JERUSALEM: Israel has rejected call for an independent inquiry into its conduct in the Gaza war.
UN-appointed investigators who concluded that Israel committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity in Gaza recommended that the UN Security Council call on Israel to investigate crimes committed by its forces. “The probe should be independent and in conformity with international standards,” they said.
The investigating team issued its findings on Tuesday. Israel promptly rejected the conclusions as biased.
Israel’s military is still conducting its own investigations into the troops’ conduct in Gaza. So far, it has cleared itself of wrongdoing.
Government spokesman Mark Regev said on Wednesday that Israel doesn’t need to conduct an independent inquiry.
He says the military probes are open to review by Israel’s independent judiciary and can be appealed. Tel Aviv launched a diplomatic and media war on Wednesday in a bid to prevent the document from being brought before the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
The head of the team, which produced the report, former South African jurist Richard Goldstone, criticized the Israeli response. “There hasn’t been any attempt thus far to deal with the contents of the report at all,” he told the Palestinian Ma’an news agency in an interview published on Wednesday.
Palestinian government spokesman Ghassan Khatib welcomed the report, calling it “positive” and saying he hoped it would be the beginning “for the international community to hold Israel accountable for its continuing crimes.”
But Israel, which refused to cooperate with the fact-finding commission, rejected out of hand its findings.
The report, said President Shimon Peres, “makes a mockery out of history,” and fails to “distinguish between attacker and defender.”
He said it was the Hamas movement that had brought on the conflict, because it and other groups had fired a total of more than 12,000 rockets and mortar shells into southern Israel leading up to the offensive. Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, in Washington, said Wednesday he was examining ways to control the damage the report is likely to cause. He said he would approach US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice to ask for American support should the commission’s findings be discussed in the Security Council.
Ayalon justified Israel’s decision not to cooperate with the UN investigation, charging its conclusions had been predetermined. “Had we cooperated, we would not have changed even a single word, and only granted it legitimacy,” he told Israel Radio.
Goldstone, in his interview with Maan, complained that Israeli officials opted not to address the charges contained in his report, but instead attacked the report as a concept and criticized its authors. He also denied that Hamas officials had accompanied his team throughout its fact-finding tour of the Gaza Strip, saying the allegation was “without truth at all.”
Hamas, too, issued a reaction. “The report represents a clear conviction of Tel Aviv,” said Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas prime minister in Gaza.
Source: Arab News
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