Near Kherbet Al-Jouz, Syria (CNN) - As the Syrian military on Tuesday continued its relentless advance against protesters, citizens who had fled their homes for safety related "horror story upon horror story" to a reporter who managed to enter the country.

Despite the Syrian government's consistent refusal to give CNN and other international news organizations permission to enter the country, a CNN reporter crossed the Turkish border into northwestern Syria for a few hours Tuesday.

She spoke to people at a makeshift campsite near Kherbet al-Jouz, where tarpaulins strung between trees provided the only shelter from the elements for the hundreds of Syrians encamped there. One family said they had spent an entire night standing rather than lie in the mud. One man tried to protect himself from the rain with branches and a piece of tarpaulin.

Families bathed in a muddy stream, where they also washed the few clothes they had brought with them.

(CNN) - The translation of the voice below the macabre YouTube video clip reads, "Look at the bruises on his face along with his broken neck." The clip is a two-and-a-half-minute gruesome catalogue of wounds on a 13-year-old child's body.

The body of Hamza Ali al-Khateeb.

On April 29, demonstrators from villages surrounding Daraa, Syria, marched on the city in an attempt to break the Syrian military siege there. Their intent was to bring in much-needed supplies, including milk for babies and crucial medicines. At the time, the crackdown on Daraa was so intense that eyewitnesses spoke of bodies bloating in the streets and the injured being treated at makeshift secret clinics to avoid detection by the Syrian security forces.

On that day, eyewitnesses say, security forces fired indiscriminately on them, killing and wounding dozens. Countless others were detained in a mass roundup.

Among them, says his family, was Hamza. He got separated from his father in the chaos.

A month later, the family received his body. The video was taken at that time by a relative, the family says.

Much of the video of the child's corpse is too graphic to broadcast. His face is bloated and purple. His body is covered in bruises. There are gunshot wounds to his torso, and his genitals are mutilated.

CNN cannot independently verify what happened to Hamza or the authenticity of the video.

Hamza's family was threatened after the video was initially broadcast by other outlets, intermediaries told CNN, and they became too petrified to talk about what happened, even to close friends.