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The General Assembly voted 114 to 18, with 44 abstentions, to endorse the report by a Human Rights Council panel led by the South African judge Richard Goldstone that said there was evidence that both Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas committed war crimes during the Gaza war last winter. The assembly’s resolution demands that both Israel and the Palestinians, without specifically naming Hamas, carry out investigations within three months. It also pushes for Security Council attention. France, Britain and Russia were among the countries that abstained, and the United States voted against the resolution. The lack of support among permanent Security Council members suggests that Council action is unlikely. Supporters basically said such serious accusations of war crimes deserved international attention, while opponents found the resolution too broad.

“But I have yet to hear from the Obama administration what the flaws in the report that they have identified are,” Mr. Goldstone said. “I mean, I would be happy to respond to them, if and when I know what they are.”

The 575-page report concluded that Israel used disproportionate force, deliberately targeted civilians, used Palestinians as human shields, and destroyed civilian infrastructure during its Dec. 27-Jan. 18 incursion into the Gaza Strip to root out Palestinian rocket squads.

The report called Israel’s military assault on Gaza “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”

In a response, the Israeli military said a white flag did not always shield someone from attack.

JERUSALEM - Israeli soldiers who fought in last winter’s Gaza war say the military used Palestinians as human shields, improperly fired incendiary white phosphorus shells over civilian areas, and used overwhelming firepower that caused needless deaths and destruction, according to a report released yesterday.

JERUSALEM, July 13 -- Britain has revoked five licenses for arms exports to Israel after reviewing how British-provided equipment was used during Israel's three-week war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, officials from both nations said Monday.

The report said one missile had hit a group of university students who were waiting for a bus in the center of Gaza City, while another struck a truck hauling oxygen tanks and a third smashed into a school sheltering people who had lost or left their homes.

In a related development on Tuesday, two Israeli groups that advocate for Palestinians, HaMoked and Gisha, revealed a new Israeli procedure that makes it impossible for Gaza residents to move to the West Bank in all but the most exceptional of cases. For example, the groups said, under the policy, chronically ill patients, orphans and elderly invalids will not be able to receive care from their closest relatives living in the West Bank if they have any relatives in Gaza capable of caring for them.

GAZA — Dozens of families still live in tents amid collapsed buildings and rusting pipes. With construction materials barred, a few are building mud-brick homes. Everything but food and medicine has to be smuggled through desert tunnels from Egypt. Among the items that people seek is an addictive pain reliever used to fight depression.