Venezuela says it has sent an army Hercules C130 cargo plane bearing 12.5 tonnes of medical supplies and other materials to the besieged population of the Gaza Strip.
The plane was headed to Cairo, where the relief aid would be transferred to trucks for their overland trip to Gaza, President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday.
"We count on the support of the Egyptian government and the United Nations so this life-sustaining shipment can reach the Palestinian people," Chavez said during his "Alo Presidente" radio talk show.
Chavez once again slammed Israel for "waging a Holocaust against the Palestinian people" in their 16-day offensive on Gaza, and said a second, 80-tonne humanitarian shipment would leave Venezuela for Gaza next week.
On Saturday, Chavez accused Israel of being the "murder arm" of the United States, and accused US President George W Bush of instigating the Israeli offensive that so far has killed close to 900 people, according to Gaza emergency services.
Venezuela on Tuesday expelled Israel's ambassador to Caracas as calls mounted in Latin America for an end to the Jewish state's deadly assault on the Gaza Strip. The following day, Israel expelled Venezuela's charge d'affaires.
Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called on Muslim countries to unite to bring about an end to Israel's "genocide" against the people of Gaza, Algeria's APS news agency reports.
Following talks with Algerian counterpart Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Ahmadinejad said that if "urgent and global measures were not taken by independent and free countries" to end Israel's deadly bombardment of Gaza, "the region, the Muslim world and humanity as a whole will be confronted with a humanitarian catastrophe on a historic scale."
Calling for coordinated political and economic sanctions against Israel, Ahmadinejad said on Sunday that Iran would offer "every support" to combat the Israeli offensive and prevent "a new genocidal stage" in its campaign against the Palestinian people.
Warning that the Muslim world and its leaders have a "historic responsibility" to act, Ahmadinejad said Islamic peoples and governments "are capable of injecting dynamism into the Palestinian intifada."
He was employing the Arabic term for uprising used to refer to the two Palestinian rebellions against Israeli occupation launched in 1987 and 2000.
Also, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer says the alliance has no plans for a peacekeeping force to supervise any ceasefire in Gaza.
Scheffer told an audience at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies on Sunday that NATO would be prepared to play a peacekeeping role only if there was a full-scale Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, consent from both sides and a UN mandate.
He acknowledged those conditions are a long way off.
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