The United Nations says more than 60,000 people have died in Syria over nearly two years of fighting between government forces and rebels opposed to President Bashar al-Assad. A new analysis of the toll conducted for the U.N. human rights office took five months to complete, using data from seven sources, including the Syrian government. The number is higher than the previous estimate of 45,000 reported by the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Rupert Colville, spokesperson for U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay, discussed the Syrian crisis on Al Jazeera Wednesday.

Rupert Colville: “It became so complicated. There were so many different people reporting casualties, so many different places where violence and fighting was going on simultaneously, and no way of really verifying each and every case. So it’s been a very difficult issue. But this is a real attempt to do an exhaustive analysis of the information we do have. It should be treated as an indicative number, not as a real number, but we believe it’s probably the minimum.”

Violence in Syria is continuing to claim scores of lives on a daily basis. More than 200 people were killed Wednesday, many of them in and around the capital Damascus, according to an opposition group. Dozens died when a government air strike hit a gas station in a Damascus suburb. An Internet video posted by rebels appears to show fighters loyal to Assad killing two men by stabbing them and hitting them with concrete blocks over an extended period of several minutes. Meanwhile, the United Nations refugee agency says about 84,000 people fled the Syrian crisis in the month of December alone, bringing the total number of people displaced by the conflict to about half a million.