UN report on Israel’s crimes in Gaza hurls it into int’l isolation

Report affirms Israel’s war machine targeted Gazans indiscriminately

Arab League urges International Criminal Court prosecutor to investigate report content

The head of the UN commission that issued a damning report on the Gaza war this week on Thursday rejected Israeli criticism that it was biased from the start.

"I deny that completely," Judge Richard Goldstone said in remarks broadcast on Thursday on public radio, a replay of an earlier interview with Israeli television.

"I was completely independent, nobody dictated any outcome, and the outcome was a result of the independent inquiries that our mission made," he said.

The UN report, which Goldstone presented at the UN on Tuesday and which accused both Israel and Palestinian resistance of committing war crimes, has faced stinging criticism in Israel.

But Goldstone, former chief prosecutor on the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, rejected the charges and said the only thing he regretted was that Israel refused to cooperate with his team.

"There is really nothing I can think of that I would do differently," he said.

"If there is any difference that I would have preferred, (it) would have been that we could have got cooperation from Israel and in particular, I would have liked the Israeli government to assist us and decide what we should investigate because that's what I asked them to do."

In the wake of the UN report, numerous Israeli commentators have launched personal attacks on Goldstone, with one rightwing paper writing: "the liberal anti-Semitism strides delicately, appoints a hostile commission and finds an obsequious Jew, to dance to the tune of the gentile landowner."

Goldstone, 70, is a South African judge who has also headed the public inquiry into violence and intimidation in the run-up to that country's first post-apartheid elections in 1994.

The impartial inquiry, which became known as the Goldstone Commission, was widely credited with preventing South Africa's slide into widespread violence with the demise of the whites-only apartheid regime.

The Israeli leadership fears one recommendation of the report in particular, according to local media -- that the UN Human Rights Council submits the report to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, which could lead to charges being brought against senior Israeli officials involved in the war.

"The goal is to avoid a slippery slope which would lead Israel to the International Criminal Court in The Hague," the left-leaning Haaretz daily quoted a senior official as saying.

Hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu huddled with his foreign minister and senior political and legal advisors late into the night on Tuesday after the report was released at the UN headquarters by Judge Richard Goldstone, a former war crimes prosecutor.

The premier along with the Israeli president and defense minister were to telephone their counterparts around the world to drive home Israel's message that the report was one-sided and unbalanced, Haaretz said.

Key Israel ally the United States said Wednesday it has concerns about "some of the recommendations".

"At initial reading, we have concerns about some of the report's recommendations," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.

The UN Fact-Finding Mission led by Justice Richard Goldstone had released on Tuesday its long-awaited report on the Gaza conflict, in which it concluded there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.

The report also concludes there is also evidence that Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes, as well as possibly crimes against humanity, in their repeated launching of rockets and mortars into Southern Israel. . .

The Mission found that, in the lead up to the Israeli military assault on Gaza, Israel imposed a blockade amounting to collective punishment and carried out a systematic policy of progressive isolation and deprivation of the Gaza Strip. During the Israeli military operation, code-named "Operation Cast Lead," houses, factories, wells, schools, hospitals, police stations and other public buildings were destroyed. Families are still living amid the rubble of their former homes long after the attacks ended, as reconstruction has been impossible due to the continuing blockade. More than 1,400 people were killed during the military operation.

Significant trauma, both immediate and long-term, has been suffered by the population of Gaza. The Report notes signs of profound depression, insomnia and effects such as bed-wetting among children. The effects on children who witnessed killings and violence, who had thought they were facing death, and who lost family members would be long lasting, the Mission found, noting in its Report that some 30 per cent of children screened at UNRWA schools suffered mental health problems.

The report concludes that the Israeli military operation was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole, in furtherance of an overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population, and in a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population. The destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses was the result of a deliberate and systematic policy which has made the daily process of living, and dignified living, more difficult for the civilian population.

The Report states that Israeli acts that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of subsistence, employment, housing and water, that deny their freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country, that limit their rights to access a court of law and an effective remedy, could lead a competent court to find that the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, has been committed.

The Report also covers violations arising from Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, including excessive force against Palestinian demonstrators, sometimes resulting in deaths, increased closures, restriction of movement and house demolitions. The detention of Palestinian Legislative Council members, the Report says, effectively paralyzed political life in the OPT.

The Mission found that through activities such as the interrogation of political activists and repression of criticism of its military actions, the Israeli Government contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent was not tolerated.