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The insurgents on Wednesday threatened to treat them as prisoners of war, an abrupt escalation in the Syrian conflict that entangled international peacekeepers for the first time.

Philippine officials said that 21 Filipino peacekeepers had been detained, calling their seizure illegal and demanding their release.

"The apprehension and illegal detention of the Filipino peacekeepers are gross violations of international law," Albert F. del Rosario, the foreign affairs secretary, said Thursday.

The Philippine government issued a statement saying that it was working with the United Nations and several nations including the United States "for the early and safe release of the Filipino peacekeepers."

"The Filipino peacekeepers are operating under the U.N. flag," the statement said. "These Filipinos are international personnel clothed with immunity and mantle of protection similar to diplomatic agents and personnel."

As the war in Syria has worsened, the Golan region has been periodically disrupted by armed clashes and occasional artillery or mortar bombardments that have become a source of concern to Israel. But United Nations officials said that members of the Golan peacekeeping mission, officially known as the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, had never before been taken by any of the combatants in the conflict.

Josephine Guerrero, a spokeswoman for the department at the United Nations that oversees the Golan operation, said the peacekeepers were detained near an observation post that had been evacuated over the past weekend after what she called "heavy combat in proximity" in the southern part of the area they control. The peacekeepers, in a convoy of trucks, had returned to investigate damage to the post when they were taken by about 30 armed rebels.

Ms. Guerrero said that the peacekeeping mission was "dispatching a team to assess the situation and attempt a resolution," and that the Syrian authorities had been asked to help.

The Philippine government said the peacekeepers were "reported to be unharmed."

A video uploaded on YouTube by a group that identified itself as the Martyrs of Yarmouk claimed responsibility on Wednesday and said the peacekeepers would be held until Syrian government forces withdrew from the area around Al Jamlah, the site of the weekend clashes. The video does not show any of the captives, but United Nations vehicles are visible.

A speaker in the video warns in Arabic: "If the withdrawal does not take place within 24 hours, we will deal with those guys like war prisoners. And praise to God."

The threat underscored the widening risk that the Syria conflict is destabilizing the Middle East, and raised new concerns about the agendas of some Syrian insurgent groups, just as Western nations, including the United States, were grappling over whether to arm them.

The seizure of the peacekeepers was the second serious war-related Syria border problem this week. On Monday, more than 40 Syrian soldiers who had sought temporary safety in Iraq were killed in an ambush as the Iraqi military was transporting them back to the Syrian border. At the United Nations, Eduardo del Buey, a spokesman for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, suggested that officials had long feared the possibility of harm to the peacekeepers. "As the secretary general has said repeatedly, the spillover effects of the Syrian crisis pose a danger to the region as a whole and to the countries and the areas in the neighboring states around it, and Undof is no exception," he said, using the acronym for the Golan peacekeeping mission. "They are in a zone where the spillover could be of consequence."

Ambassador Vitaly I. Churkin of Russia, which holds the monthly presidency of the Security Council for March, said that members had been briefed about the Golan situation but that he could provide no further information on what precisely had happened. Mr. Churkin, whose government is a main supporter of the Syrian government in the conflict and a strong critic of the armed rebels, urged the captors to release the peacekeepers immediately. "They should stop this very dangerous course of action," he told reporters.

Linking the Golan situation to the Iraq killings two days earlier, Mr. Churkin said: "Some people are trying very hard to extend the Syrian conflict. Today there is this incident. This is no man's land between Syria and Israel. Somebody is trying very hard to blow this crisis up."

With a force of 1,011 troops contributed by Austria, Croatia, India and the Philippines, the United Nations observer force in the Golan is responsible for maintaining the fragile calm between Israeli and Syrian troops at the demilitarized zone along Syria's Golan frontier, established after a cease-fire ended the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

The detention of the peacekeepers came less than a week after Croatia announced it was withdrawing its soldiers from the Golan force, following reports that Croatia was selling weapons funneled to Syrian rebels by Saudi Arabia, a main supporter of the insurgency. The Croatian government denied the reports but said they had put the safety of its peacekeepers at risk. It is unclear which country or countries will replace the departing Croatians.

News of the peacekeepers' seizure came on a day of other precedents in the two-year Syrian conflict, which has left more than 70,000 people dead.

Antigovernment fighters battling military forces in the north-central city of Raqqa, where fighting has raged for days, released a video on YouTube corroborating their earlier claims that they had arrested the provincial governor and the provincial secretary general of President Bashar al-Assad's Baath Party, who activists said were the two highest-ranking Assad loyalists captured so far. The video showed both men seated uncomfortably on an ornate couch, apparently in the governor's palace, surrounded by insurgents.