“Kuwait will contact members of the Arab League to hold an emergency ministerial meeting to study the situation and take measures to put an end to the oppressive practices against the Syrian people,” said a foreign ministry statement cited by the official KUNA news agency.
Kuwait has also made contacts at regional and international levels “to urge the international community to assume its responsibility to stop the bloodshed,” the ministry said.
It strongly condemned the “brutal crime carried out by the Syrian regime forces in the town of Houla which resulted in the killing of dozens, most of them children and women.”
UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahayan called Saturday for an urgent Arab League meeting, saying the “massacre shows the failure of Arab and international efforts to stop the violence against civilians in Syria.”
The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, grouping Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, also urged the international community to “assume its responsibilities.”
Hundreds of Kuwaitis including several MPs rallied outside the Syrian embassy on Saturday to condemn the massacre. The protesters demanded that the Kuwait government send arms to the rebel Free Syrian Army.
The bloodied bodies of children, some with their skulls split open, were shown in footage posted to YouTube purporting to show the victims of the shelling in the central town of Houla on Friday.
The carnage underlined just how far Syria is from any negotiated path out of the 14-month-old revolt against President Bashar al-Assad.
“This morning U.N. military and civilian observers went to Houla and counted more than 32 children under the age of 10 and over 60 adults killed,” the head of U.N. team monitoring the ceasefire negotiated by former U.N. Secretary general Kofi Annan – which has yet to take hold – said.
“The observers confirmed from examination of ordinances the use of artillery tank shells,” Major General Robert Mood said in a statement, without elaborating. “Whoever started, whoever responded and whoever carried out this deplorable act of violence should be held responsible.”
Mood described the violence as “indiscriminate and disproportionate.”
