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GENEVA —Thousands of people were fleeing Damascus and heading into Lebanon on Friday, according to the U.N. refugee agency, as rebels described the bloodiest fighting in the 17-month uprising.

Between 8,500 and 30,000 Syrians have crossed into Lebanon in the past 48 hours, said an agency spokeswoman, Melissa Fleming, at a news briefing in Geneva.

The new flood adds to an exodus of more than 112,000 who have already registered as refugees in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, and many thousands more who have fled but not registered.

U.N. relief agencies say three-quarters of them are women and children, often arriving in a desperate state with no more than the clothes they are wearing. Internally, as many as 1 million people have been displaced, according to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.

The government forces in Damascus, the Syrian capital, claimed Friday to have retaken a pocket of the city a day after rebel fighters, building on the momentum gained by their brazen assassination of top security officials, seized all four border crossings with Iraq and one into Turkey.

Syrian state television reported that a fourth member of President Bashar Assad’s elite circle, Hisham Ikhtiar, the head of general security, had died of wounds sustained in Wednesday’s rebel bombing at a security headquarters building.

Syrian state media and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Britain, said government forces had retaken a section of the Midan neighborhood Friday, while the number of dead in fighting across Syria on Thursday was reported to have risen above 300. Of the dead, 98 were soldiers, 139 civilians and 65 rebels, rebels said.

Conditions across Damascus were growing more difficult, Fleming said, with shops running out of supplies and closing. She said relief agency workers were hearing that state and private banks have run out of funds.

“Many Syrians in general are running low on resources and increasingly turning to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and other organizations for help,” she added.

Fleming said among the most vulnerable were about 8,000 refugees from other countries, mainly Iraq, who have fled homes in the Damascus suburb of Seida Zeinab in the face of the fighting and violent threats targeting them. At least 2,000 more foreigners, along with many Syrians, fled their homes to take shelter in parks and schools in the suburb of Jaramana, she said.