Israeli tank shells killed six Palestinians at a United Nations-run school in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday, Palestinian medical workers said. "This yet again illustrates the tragedy that there is no safe place in Gaza. Not even a UN installation is safe," Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, told AFP.
"There is no place to flee," he said.
Elsewhere in the territory, a two-year-old baby and three other people died as Israel pounded Gaza with some 50 raids on tunnels, rocket launchers and suspected weapons stores including two mosques, medics and the army said.
Meanwhile, the U.N. General Assembly called in a nonbinding resolution on Friday for an immediate, durable truce in Gaza, rejecting a more radical text proposed by a group of Islamic and Latin American countries. The assembly's electronic scoreboard showed 142 countries in favour, four opposed and eight abstaining.
Voting against were Israel, the United States and the Pacific island of Nauru, which believed the resolution was biased against Israel. Venezuela, which thought it was too soft on the Jewish state, was also shown by the board as voting against although the country's delegate said he abstained, according to Reuters.
Like the council's text, Friday's resolution calls for "an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip." The adopted text was hammered out in negotiations between the European Union and the Palestinian Authority's ambassador, Riyad Mansour, and was supported by moderate Arab states.
