New York  - The United Nations on Monday appealed to the Israeli government to institute longer lulls in the fighting so more humanitarian assistance can be provided to the population in Gaza Strip.

The Israeli Defense Forces repeated a three-hour lull on Monday to allow dozens of trucks carrying relief supplies to enter Gaza. But John Holmes, the coordinator for UN humanitarian operations, said the lull should last 24 hours and be renewed.

"The three-hour lulls have continued but they are far from satisfactory," Holmes said at UN headquarters in New York. "The time has changed and in some occasions have caused confusion for aid agencies and the population, of course."

Beirut  - The Italian contingent in the United Nations Interim Forces in Southern Lebanon (UNIFIL) Sunday arrested two people disguised as cleaners trying to smuggle "plastic material that could be explosives" into a UN base in southern Lebanon, a UN statement said.

According to a statement from the Italian peacekeeping force, their troops arrested two Lebanese men on charges of smuggling plastic explosives into their headquarters in the southern town of Tebnine.

Jerusalem, Jan 11 : UN experts have said the US abstention on Thursday night’s Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza should be viewed as a warning to Israeli leaders that Washington’s patience may be running thin. 

Outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who spent three days in New York shuttling between conference chambers to help broker a deal between Arab nations and Western powers, told reporters on Friday that the abstention was meant as an endorsement of the multilateral peace talks taking place in Cairo. 

“It was simply believed that this might have been a little premature,” The Jerusalem Post quoted Rice as saying at a briefing. 

Jerusalem - The Israeli military denied on Saturday that its forces fired on a United Nations convoy days earlier.

"We are 100 per cent certain we did not fire upon the truck," a spokesman for the Israeli military said.

Israeli military sources went further, saying they were fairly certain Hamas had been the source of the fire.

In the incident Thursday, the UN said two of its local employees were killed trying to bring humanitarian supplies from the northern Erez border crossing into the enclave.

New York  - United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told Israeli caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Olmert Friday that he was disappointed the fighting in the Gaza Strip continued despite the ceasefire demanded by the UN Security Council.

"The secretary general expressed his disappointment that the violence has continued on the ground in disregard of the resolution adopted by the UN Security Council," said UN spokeswoman Michelle Montas.

New York  - Human rights group Amnesty International Friday called on the United Nations Security Council to deploy human rights investigators in Israel and the Gaza Strip and to hold the warring parties accountable for war crimes.

The London-based group said in a letter to the 15-nation council that it should take "firm action to ensure full accountability for war crimes and other serious abuses of international human rights and humanitarian law" in Gaza.

It asked that investigators be sent to Gaza and southern Israel to report on abuses by all parties in the Israel-Hamas conflict.