United Nations, Oct 30 (IANS) The UN General Assembly has approved a resolution calling on the US to end its 46-year-old economic embargo on Cuba, EFE reported Thursday.Washington was joined by Israel and Pacific Ocean island nation Palau in opposing Wednesday’s non-binding resolution adopted with 185 votes. The Marshall Islands and Micronesia abstained, while El Salvador and Iraq did not take part in the voting.

The resolution was UN Assembly’s 17th consecutive initiative asking US to end the ban on the communist-ruled Caribbean island nation.

“Seven in every 10 Cubans have spent his entire life under this irrational and useless policy (of US sanction),” Cuban Foreign Minister Perez Roque told the assembly before the voting. “The embargo is older than Mr. Barack Obama (the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee) and than my entire generation,” he said.

Obama was actually born in August 1961, about six months before the embargo was imposed.

The foreign minister defended Havana’s rejection of the $5 million aid offered by the US saying Havana could not “accept the help of those who have tightened the embargo, the sanctions and (increased) the hostility against the Cuban people”.

Earlier, US envoy Ronald Goddard accused the Cuban regime of putting its own political interests ahead of the well-being of its people by rejecting on four occasions Washington’s “unconditional offers” of assistance after the the island was battered by two recent hurricanes.

Cuba says the embargo has cost its economy more than $90 billion since February 1962.