AN IRANIAN newspaper's contest for cartoons about the Holocaust has received 200 entries, including submissions that criticise Israeli treatment of Palestinians and United States foreign policy.

While the contest entrants are mostly Iranian, at least six Americans have submitted cartoons, as have other artists from Indonesia and Brazil, Hamshahri newspaper said.

Hamshahri, one of Iran's top five newspapers, began the contest last month as a test of the Western world's freedom of expression and readiness to reprint cartoons about the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews in the Second World War. The contest, which runs until 15 May, comes in response to caricatures of Islam's Prophet Muhammad that sparked protests, some violent, across much of the Muslim world.