The United Nations says a UN-sponsored summer camp that will be the site of a kite-flying contest in northwest Gaza has been vandalized.
Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN agency that runs the camp, says the vandals torched a stage, burned a UN flag and damaged a billboard. But he says nobody was hurt. He had no information on who vandalized the facility early Thursday.
Similar attacks have taken place in the past at UN summer camps in Gaza, where boys and girls mix. Suspicion has fallen on Islamic hard-liners who oppose mixing of the genders.
Gunness says the damage will be repaired in time for Gaza children to try to set a world record at the facility for the largest number of children flying kites later Thursday.
Last year, dozens of masked gunmen vandalized a UN summer camp being set up for children and teens on Gaza's Mediterranean coast, leaving behind three bullets and a note threatening to kill John Ging, the director of Gaza operations for the United Nation's Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and others unless the UN canceled its activities for some 250,000 Gaza children.
