UN says Israel committed war crimes in Gaza

[Naveed Yaseen]

UNITED NATIONS: Israel targeted "the people of Gaza as a whole" in the three-week military operation, which is estimated to have killed more than 1,300 Palestinians at the beginning of this year, according to a UN-commissioned report published yesterday.

A UN fact-finding mission led by the South African judge Richard Goldstone said Israel should face prosecution by the International Criminal Court unless it opened independent investigations of what the report said were repeated violations of international law, "possible war crimes and crimes against humanity" during the operation.

Using by far the strongest language of any of the numerous reports criticising Operation Cast Lead, the UN mission, which interviewed victims, witnesses and others in Gaza and Geneva this summer, says that, while Israel had portrayed the war as self-defence in response to Hamas rocket attacks, it "considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.

"In this respect the operations were in furtherance of an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience and for its apparent support for Hamas, and possibly with the intent of forcing a change in such support," the report said.

The 575-page document presented to yesterday's session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva was swiftly denounced by Israel. The foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said the UN mission had "dealt a huge blow to governments seeking to defend their citizens from terror", and that its conclusions were "so disconnected with realities on the ground that one cannot but wonder on which planet was the Gaza Strip they visited".

The Gaza war began on 27 December 2008 and ended on 18 January 2009.

The UN report found that the statements of military and political leaders in Israel before and during the operation indicated that they intended the use of "disproportionate force", aimed not only at the enemy but also at the "supporting infrastructure". The mission adds, "In practice this appears to have meant the civilian population."

The mission also had harsh conclusions about Hamas and other armed groups, acknowledging that rocket and mortar attacks have caused terror in southern Israel, and saying that, where such attacks were launched into civilians areas, they would "constitute war crimes" and "may amount to crimes against humanity".

It also condemned the extrajudicial killings, detention and ill-treatment of Palestinian detainees by the Hamas regime in Gaza – as well as by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank – and called for the release on humanitarian grounds of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal abducted by Gaza militants in June 2006.

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