The border fence separating the Golan Heights from Syria. Photo: Wikipedia.

The UN General Assembly on Tuesday adopted a resolution demanding Israel give back territories it captured nearly 50 years ago — as well as the people residing in them — to Syria.

Turkey, which demands that embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad leave power, backed the resolution, as did Saudi Arabia, which supports rebel groups also battling Assad.

While countries like France and Germany abstained from the vote that passed by a large majority, only six countries voted no, including Israel, the United States and Canada.

The resolution demands Israel “resume talks on the Syrian and Lebanese tracks.”

“It’s astonishing,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, in a statement on the organization’s website. “At a time when the Syrian regime is massacring its own people, how can the UN call for more people to be subject to Assad’s rule? The timing is morally galling and logically absurd.”

“What is also outrageous is that these resolutions claim to care about Palestinians, yet the UN proves itself oblivious to the hundreds of Palestinians who continue to be slaughtered, maimed and expelled by Assad’s forces,” he said.

Monitors and analysts say Assad’s forces are responsible for tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths, many of them civilians, in the ongoing civil war in Syria.

UN Watch reported that another five resolutions drafted by the Palestinian Authority were adopted on Tuesday that criticized Israeli policy while failing to mention the ongoing spate of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis in the West Bank and Israel.

One of the resolutions urged Israel to end its “occupation” of the Palestinian territories and invoked the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

“Surreal barely captures the scene: the world is under assault by terrorists killing in the name of Islam and martyrhood — as Palestinians did this week while stabbing Israeli Jews — and the UN’s response is to reflexively condemn Israel in six separate resolutions, all of which are one-sided,” said Neuer.

“The farce at the General Assembly underscores a simple fact: the UN’s automatic majority has no interest in truly helping Palestinians, nor in protecting anyone’s human rights; the goal of these ritual, one-sided condemnations remains the scapegoating of Israel,” he said.

The UN has a longstanding reputation of disproportionate criticism of Israel.

JNS contributed to this report.