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The World Food Program, the food agency of the United Nations, said it was providing food to one and a half million people inside Syria this month but as many as two and a half million need help, mostly in areas made hazardous by fighting between insurgents and loyalist forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

"Our partners are overstretched and there is no capacity to expand operations further; we need more implementing partners," said a World Food Program spokeswoman, Elizabeth Byrs, at the agency's Geneva headquarters.

She also said acute fuel shortages in Syria had caused delays in food deliveries and contributed to severe inflation in the price of bread because bakeries in Syria needed fuel for their ovens. In the contested northern city of Aleppo, for example, the price of a kilogram of bread is now 250 Syrian pounds, or about $3.50, at least 50 percent higher than in other parts of Syria and at least six times more than its cost when the Syrian conflict began nearly two years ago.

The United Nations appealed last month for $1.5 billion in additional aid to handle the growing crisis created by the Syrian conflict, which has left at least 60,000 people dead and is threatening to destabilize the Middle East. More than half a million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries and the United Nations refugee agency has forecast a doubling of that number by the middle of 2013.

The most heavily burdened neighbors — Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon — have been persistently calling for more international aid, particularly during the cold winter months.

At the sprawling Zaatari refugee camp in northern Jordan on Tuesday, at least 11 people were injured when fighting erupted during food distribution, after a night of relentless cold rain inundated parts of the encampment and left many of the roughly 54,000 inhabitants, more than half of them children, miserable and cold. More than half of the injured were workers from Save the Children, one of the international agencies that helps the United Nations refugee agency administer the camp. It was unclear how the aid workers had been injured.

"The incident followed a night of heavy storms, during which torrential rains and high winds swept away tents and left parts of the camp flooded," Save the Children said in a statement.

Mohammed Abu Asaker, a spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency, acknowledged weather-related problems at the camp, aggravated by a large number of new residents — roughly 9,000 arrivals in the past week.

"It is a difficult situation in the camp," he said. "There is a frustration from the refugees. The number is increasing and the weather is very cold."