United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict

The United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, known as the Goldstone Report, was a team established in April 2009 by the United Nations Human Rights Council

United Nations Human Rights Council

The United Nations Human Rights Council is an inter-governmental body within the United Nations System. The UNHRC is the successor to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights , and is a subsidiary body of the United Nations General Assembly...

(UNHRC) during the Gaza War (January 2009) as an independent international fact-finding mission to investigate alleged violations of international human rights law

International human rights law

International human rights law refers to the body of international law designed to promote and protect human rights at the international, regional and domestic levels...

and international humanitarian law

International humanitarian law

International humanitarian law , often referred to as the laws of war, the laws and customs of war or the law of armed conflict, is the legal corpus that comprises "the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Conventions, as well as subsequent treaties, case law, and customary international law." It...

in the Palestinian territories

Palestinian territories

The Palestinian territories comprise the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Since the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988, the region is today recognized by three-quarters of the world's countries as the State of Palestine or simply Palestine, although this status is not recognized by the...

, particularly the Gaza Strip

Gaza Strip

thumb|Gaza city skylineThe Gaza Strip lies on the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The Strip borders Egypt on the southwest and Israel on the south, east and north. It is about long, and between 6 and 12 kilometres wide, with a total area of...

, in connection with Gaza War. South African jurist Richard Goldstone

Richard Goldstone

Richard Joseph Goldstone is a South African former judge. After working for 17 years as a commercial lawyer, he was appointed by the South African government to serve on the Transvaal Supreme Court from 1980 to 1989 and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of South Africa from 1990 to 1994...

was appointed to head the mission.

Israel refused to cooperate with the report, which was released on September 15, 2009. The report accused both Israel Defense Forces

Israel Defense Forces

The Israel Defense Forces , commonly known in Israel by the Hebrew acronym Tzahal , are the military forces of the State of Israel. They consist of the ground forces, air force and navy. It is the sole military wing of the Israeli security forces, and has no civilian jurisdiction within Israel...

and Palestinian militants of war crime

War crime

War crimes are serious violations of the laws applicable in armed conflict giving rise to individual criminal responsibility...

s and possible crimes against humanity. It recommended that the sides openly investigate their own conduct and if they failed to do so, to bring the allegations to the International Criminal Court

International Criminal Court

The International Criminal Court is a permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression .It came into being on 1 July 2002—the date its founding treaty, the Rome Statute of the...

. The government of Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

rejected the report as prejudiced and full of errors, and also sharply rejected the charge that it had a policy of deliberately targeting civilians. The militant Islamic group Hamas

Hamas

Hamas is the Palestinian Sunni Islamic or Islamist political party that governs the Gaza Strip. Hamas also has a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades...

initially rejected some of the report's findings, but then urged world powers to embrace it.

The controversial report received wide support among countries in the United Nations

United Nations

The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

, while Western countries were split between supporters and opponents of the resolutions endorsing the report. Critics of the report claimed that it contained methodological failings, legal and factual errors, and falsehoods, and devoted insufficient attention to the allegations that Hamas was deliberately operating in heavily populated areas of Gaza.

On April 1, 2011, Goldstone retracted his claim that it was Israeli government policy to deliberately target citizens, saying "If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document". On the 14th of April 2011 the three other co authors of the United Nations (UN) fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008-2009 Hina Jilani

Hina Jilani

Hina Jilani is an advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and a human-rights activist from Lahore in Punjab, Pakistan.-Work:Jilani is internationally recognized for her expertise in critical human rights investigations. She started practising law in 1979, when Pakistan was under martial law...

, Christine Chinkin

Christine Chinkin

Christine Chinkin is a Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science and theWilliam W. Cook Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. She is a member of the four person United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict created by...

and Desmond Travers

Desmond Travers

Desmond Travers is a retired Irish soldier and peace-keeper. Since retirement he has studied international law and continued working in peace-keeping, most recently as one of the authors of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, or "Goldstone Report".- Career :Travers began...

released a joint statement criticizing Goldstones recantation of this aspect of the report. They all agreed that the report was valid and that Israel and Hamas had failed to investigate alleged war crimes satisfactorily.

Mandate of mission

On January 3, 2009, in response to the Gaza War, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference's executive committee asked the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to send a fact-finding mission to Gaza. On January 12, the council adopted Resolution S-9/1, deciding "to dispatch an urgent, independent international fact-finding mission, to be appointed by the President of the Council, to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying Power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression, and calls upon Israel not to obstruct the process of investigation and to fully cooperate with the mission" Upon being asked to lead the Mission, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights is a United Nations agency that works to promote and protect the human rights that are guaranteed under international law and stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948...

Mary Robinson

Mary Therese Winifred Robinson served as the seventh, and first female, President of Ireland from 1990 to 1997, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, from 1997 to 2002. She first rose to prominence as an academic, barrister, campaigner and member of the Irish Senate...

expressed disappointment with the mandate and refused to head the Mission for that reason. She stated that the resolution adopted by UN Human Rights Council was one-sided and "guided not by human rights but by politics." She later expressed full support for the report. Richard Goldstone initially refused the appointment for the same reason, calling the mandate "biased" and "uneven-handed." In January 2011, Goldstone said that the UNHRC "repeatedly rush to pass condemnatory resolutions in the face of alleged violations of human rights law by Israel but fail to take similar action in the face of even more serious violations by other States. Until the Gaza Report they failed to condemn the firing of rockets and mortars at Israeli civilian centers."

Following Goldstone's objection, the mandate was informally widened to cover activities by Palestinian militants as well, and this was the formulation quoted by the final report. Its mandate was "to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.
Speaking at Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

, Goldstone noted that the widened mandate was presented by the president of the UNHRC to a plenary session, where it did not encounter a single objection. He later described as "tiresome and inept" allegations forwarded by U.S. Secretary of State

United States Secretary of State

The United States Secretary of State is the head of the United States Department of State, concerned with foreign affairs. The Secretary is a member of the Cabinet and the highest-ranking cabinet secretary both in line of succession and order of precedence...

Hillary Clinton that the mandate had not been broadened to cover violations by all parties.

Despite Ambassador Martin Uhomoibhi's verbal commitment that there was no objection to the revised mandate, the Human Rights Council never voted to revise the mandate, and resolution S-9/1 remained unchanged.

Mission members

According to the mission's report, "The President appointed Justice Richard Goldstone

Richard Goldstone

, former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa

Constitutional Court of South Africa

The Constitutional Court of South Africa was established in 1994 by South Africa's first democratic constitution: the Interim Constitution of 1993. In terms of the 1996 Constitution the Constitutional Court established in 1994 continues to hold office. The court began its first sessions in February...

and former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991, more commonly referred to as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia or ICTY, is a...

and Rwanda

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is an international court established in November 1994 by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 955 in order to judge people responsible for the Rwandan Genocide and other serious violations of international law in Rwanda, or by Rwandan...

, to head the Mission. The other three appointed members were: Christine Chinkin

Christine Chinkin

, Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who took part in a fact-finding mission to Beit Hanoun

Beit Hanoun

Beit Hanoun is a city on the north-east edge of the Gaza Strip. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the town had a population of 32,187 in mid-year 2006. It is administered by the Palestinian Authority...

in 2008; Hina Jilani

Hina Jilani

, Advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan

Supreme Court of Pakistan

The Supreme Court is the apex court in Pakistan's judicial hierarchy, the final arbiter of legal and constitutional disputes. The Supreme Court has a permanent seat in Islamabad. It has number of Branch Registries where cases are heard. It has a number of de jure powers which are outlined in the...

and a member of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur

Commission of Inquiry on Darfur

The following is a summary of a public report. The full report can be found on the United Nations website listed in the external links.The International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur was established pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1564 , adopted on 18 September 2004...

in 2004; and Desmond Travers

Desmond Travers

, a former colonel in the Irish Defence Forces

Irish Defence Forces

The armed forces of Ireland, known as the Defence Forces encompass the Army, Naval Service, Air Corps and Reserve Defence Force.The current Supreme Commander of the Irish Defence forces is His Excellency Michael D Higgins in his role as President of Ireland...

and member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for International Criminal Investigations."

Richard J. Goldstone is a former South African Constitutional Court

Constitutional Court of South Africa

judge

Judge

A judge is a person who presides over court proceedings, either alone or as part of a panel of judges. The powers, functions, method of appointment, discipline, and training of judges vary widely across different jurisdictions. The judge is supposed to conduct the trial impartially and in an open...

and served as the chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

and for Rwanda

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

.

Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch is an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. Its headquarters are in New York City and it has offices in Berlin, Beirut, Brussels, Chicago, Geneva, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo,...

(HRW) applauded the selection of Goldstone to head the mission, saying that "Justice Goldstone's reputation for fairness and integrity is unmatched, and his investigation provides the best opportunity to address alleged violations by both Hamas and Israel". Goldstone was a board member of HRW at that time, which HRW noted in their article. Gerald Steinberg of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor

NGO Monitor

NGO Monitor is a non-governmental organization based in Jerusalem, Israel whose stated aim is to generate and distribute critical analysis and reports on the output of the international NGO community for the benefit of government policy makers, journalists, philanthropic organizations and the...

and journalist Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author. She began her career on the left of the political spectrum, writing for such publications as The Guardian and New Statesman. In the 1990s she moved to the right, and she now writes for the Daily Mail newspaper, covering political and social...

said that even though Goldstone resigned from HRW after the inquiry began, his impartiality was compromised by his link to an organization that accused Israel of war crimes.

In March 2009, Goldstone, Travers and Jilani signed an open letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the United Nations Security Council, calling for those who perpetrated "gross violations of the laws of war," "gross violations of international humanitarian law" and "targeting of civilians" to be brought to account. The letter concluded: "The events in Gaza have shocked us to the core. Relief and reconstruction are desperately needed but, for the real wounds to heal, we must also establish the truth about crimes perpetuated against civilians on both sides." The chief rabbi of South Africa Warren Goldstein

Warren Goldstein

Rabbi Warren Goldstein is the Chief Rabbi of South Africa since 2005. Born in Pretoria, he currently lives in Johannesburg. He is the first Chief Rabbi of South Africa who was born in South Africa and the youngest person ever to be appointed to that post, at age 32.-Education:The Chief Rabbi...

and Melanie Phillips asserted that this statement, made before the work of the mission has begun, violated provisions for impartiality of the fact-finding missions. Mary Robinson called Goldstone "a dedicated and unimpeachable human rights lawyer and advocate" who "was able to work with the [Human Rights] Council’s president to secure an agreement that he felt confident would permit the mandate to be interpreted in such a way as to allow his team to address the actions taken by both parties to the conflict."

In January 2009, before her appointment to the mission, Christine Chinkin

Christine Chinkin

co-signed a letter published in the Sunday Times describing Israel's military offensive in Gaza as "an act of aggression." The letter also stated that the firing of rockets by Hamas into Israel and suicide bombings

Palestinian political violence

Palestinian political violence refers to acts of violence undertaken to further the Palestinian cause. These political objectives include self-determination in and sovereignty over Palestine, the liberation of Palestine and establishment of a Palestinian state, either in place of both Israel and...

are "contrary to international humanitarian law and are war crimes." Critics, among them Howard L. Berman, said that Chinkin should have been disqualified to preserve the impartiality of the mission. In August 2009, NGO UN Watch

UN Watch

UN Watch is a Geneva-based NGO whose stated mission is "to monitor the performance of the United Nations by the yardstick of its own Charter". It is an accredited NGO in Special Consultative Status to the UN Economic and Social Council and an Associate NGO to the UN Department of Public Information...

submitted a petition to the UN, calling for Chinkin's disqualification. In May 2009, Chinkin denied the charges, saying that her statement only addressed jus ad bellum

Jus ad bellum

Jus ad bellum is a set of criteria that are to be consulted before engaging in war, in order to determine whether entering into war is permissible; that is, whether it is a just war....

, and not jus in bello."

The inquiry members said that the mission investigated whether Israel, Hamas or the Palestinian Authority had unnecessarily harmed innocent civilians, stating "On those issues the letter co-signed by Chinkin expressed no view at all." The members wrote that the fact-finding mission was not a judicial or even a quasi-judicial proceeding. Hillel Neuer

Hillel Neuer

Hillel C. Neuer is executive director of UN Watch, a human rights NGO in Geneva, Switzerland.Originally from Montreal, Neuer has written on law, politics and international affairs for publications such as the International Herald Tribune, Juriste International, Commentary, The New Republic Online...

, director of UN Watch, said that the basic standards for international fact-finding missions had been ignored. Goldstone agreed that the letter could have been the grounds for disqualification if the mission had been a judicial inquiry. Two groups, a group of UK lawyers and academics, and a group of Canadian lawyers, said they supported the UN Watch request that Chinkin be disqualified and expressed disappointment that it was rejected.

Investigation

The mission convened on 4 May in Geneva and during a week-long session held meetings with UN Member States, NGOs and representatives of the UN. By the end of the session, the mission established its methodology and a three-month program of work. The mission issued a press release on 8 May describing the mandate, progress and plans. Goldstone stated that the focus of the investigation would be on "an objective and impartial analysis of compliance of the parties to the conflict with their obligations under international human rights and humanitarian law, especially their responsibility to ensure the protection of civilians and non-combatants," adding "I believe that an objective assessment of the issues is in the interests of all parties, will promote a culture of accountability and could serve to promote greater peace and security in the region."

On June 8, the mission invited "all interested persons and organizations to submit relevant information and documentation that will assist in the implementation of the Mission's mandate." Submissions were to focus on "events and conduct that occurred in the context of the armed conflict that took place between 27 December 2008 and 19 January 2009" and that "for the purposes of its mandate, events since June 2008 are particularly relevant to the conflict."

The mission conducted two field visits to Gaza, entering through the Rafah Border Crossing from Egypt

Egypt

Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

after access through Israel was denied. The first visit, on June 1–5, 2009, included a tour of the sites and interviews with victims and witnesses. Investigations continued during the second visit, from 26 June to 1 July, with public hearings. In the course of the investigation, the committee conducted 188 interviews, reviewed 10,000 pages of documents and inspected 1,200 photographs.

Israel refused to cooperate with the investigation, citing anti-Israel bias in the UNHRC and the mission's one-sided founding resolution. Israel also stated that the mission would be unable to question Palestinian militants who fired rockets at Israel. The team was denied access to military sources, and entrance to Gaza via Israel.

According to Western media reports, Hamas was very cooperative; nevertheless, Goldstone pointed out that in some areas of information the committee did not receive full cooperation from the Palestinians. It was also reported that the team had been escorted by Hamas minders who could have intimidated witnesses. Goldstone dismissed these allegations as "baseless".

At the end of a four-day trip, the head of the team expressed shock at the scale of destruction. Goldstone announced that the team would hold public hearings with the war's victims later in June, in Gaza and Geneva. Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard law school, said cases like the one being probed by the UN inquiry team are hard to investigate, especially without military records.

In the morning session of 6 July, Israeli witnesses and representatives testified in front of the committee, describing years of living under rocket attack. The last to take the floor during the session was Noam Shalit, father of the Israeli captive soldier Gilad Shalit

Gilad Shalit

Gilad Shalit is an Israeli – French citizen and Israel Defense Forces soldier. On 25 June 2006, he was captured inside Israel by Hamas militants in a cross-border raid via underground tunnels near the border with Gaza. The Hamas militants held him for over five years, until he was released on...

who at that time had been imprisoned in Gaza for three years, with no visit by the Red Cross permitted. Later that day, pro-Palestinian witnesses and experts from Israel and the West Bank testified. The next day, a military expert testified on weapons use by Hamas and Israel and an international law expert testified at Goldstone’s Gaza hearings. Following the two-day session, Goldstone said that the investigation entered its final phase, but that it was too soon to conclude that war crimes were committed.

Israeli lawyer Charles Abelsohn criticized the objectivity of the committee members, citing Travers who said during the public hearings that "there have been instances of the shooting of children in front of their parents. As an ex-soldier I find that kind of action to be very, very strange and very unique", asking the witness to comment on those insights.

The commission's report states that during and after the investigation, several Palestinians cooperating with the Mission were detained by Israeli security forces. One of them was Muhammad Srour, a member of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in Nilin, who testified before the Mission in Geneva; en-route back to West Bank he was arrested. After UN intervention, he was released. Israeli security sources said that Sruor was detained for questioning on suspicion that he was involved in terror activity and that his visit to Geneva had no bearing on the arrest. Another witness, Shawan Jabarin, General Director of the Palestinian human-rights organisation Al Haq

Al Haq

Al-Haq is an independent Palestinian human rights organization founded in 1979 and based in Ramallah in the West Bank. It monitors and documents human rights violations by all parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, issuing reports on its findings and producing detailed legal studies.Al-Haq...

, had to be heard by videoconference, as he has been subject to a travel ban by Israel since 2006 preventing him from leaving the West Bank on the grounds that he is a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a Palestinian Marxist-Leninist organisation founded in 1967. It has consistently been the second-largest of the groups forming the Palestine Liberation Organization , the largest being Fatah...

Report

On September 15, 2009, a 574 page report was released.
The report concluded that the Israel Defence Force (IDF) and Palestinian militant groups had committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. While the report condemned violations by both sides, it differentiated between the moral and legal severity of the violations of the Israeli forces compared to those of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. Goldstone stated that the mission "wasn’t an investigation, it was a fact-finding mission” and that the conclusion that war crimes had been committed "was always intended as conditional". He described the allegations as "a useful road map" for independent investigations by Israel and the Palestinians. He later added that the mission did not conduct a judicial investigation, and stated that its findings did not amount to "the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt". He described it as a prima facie

Prima facie

Prima facie is a Latin expression meaning on its first encounter, first blush, or at first sight. The literal translation would be "at first face", from the feminine form of primus and facies , both in the ablative case. It is used in modern legal English to signify that on first examination, a...

case, "reasonable on weighing the evidence" and said that the information obtained would not be admissible as evidence in a criminal court.

Blockade of Gaza allegations

The report stated that the blockade constituted a violation of Israel's obligations as an occupying power in Gaza.

Civilian targeting allegations

The report disputes Israel's claim that the Gaza war would have been conducted as a response to rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, saying that at least in part the war was targeted against the "people of Gaza as a whole". Intimidation against the population was seen as an aim of the war.
. The report also says that Israel’s military assault on Gaza was designed to "humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability”.

The report focused on 36 cases that it said constituted a representative sample. In 11 of these episodes, it said the Israeli military carried out direct attacks against civilians, including some in which civilians were shot “while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags”. Talking to Bill Moyers Journal, Goldstone said that the committee chose 36 incidents that represented the highest death toll, where there seemed to be little or no military justification for what happened. According to the report, another alleged war crime committed by IDF include “wanton” destruction of food production, water and sewerage facilities; the report also asserts that some attacks, which were supposedly aimed to kill small number of combatants amidst significant numbers of civilians, were disproportionate.

The report concluded that Israel violated the Fourth Geneva Convention

Fourth Geneva Convention

The Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, commonly referred to as the Fourth Geneva Convention and abbreviated as GCIV, is one of the four treaties of the Geneva Conventions. It was adopted in August 1949, and defines humanitarian protections for civilians...

by targeting civilians, which it labeled "a grave breach". It also claimed that the violations were "systematic and deliberate", which placed the blame in the first place on those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw the operations. The report recommended, inter alia, that Israel pay reparations to Palestinians living in Gaza for property damage caused during the conflict.

Al-Maqadmah mosque incident

The report stated that the strike on the al-Maqadmah mosque on the outskirts of Jabilyah occurred when between 200 and 300 men and women attended for their evening prayer, with 15 people being killed and 40 wounded as a result of the attack. The Mission has established that the Israeli armed forces fired a missile that struck near the doorway of the mosque. The Mission found that the mosque was damaged and lodged in its interior walls with "small metal cubes", several of which were retrieved by the Mission when it inspected the site. The Mission concluded that the mosque had been hit by an air-to-ground missile fitted with a shrapnel fragmentation sleeve, fired from an aircraft. The Mission based its findings on investigation of the site, photographs and interviewing witnesses. The Mission found no indications that the mosque was used to launch rockets, store munitions or shelter combatants. The Mission also found that no other damage was done in the area at the time, making the attack an isolated incident. The Mission concluded that the Israelis intentionally bombed the mosque. Judge Goldstone said: "Assuming that weapons were stored in the mosque, it would not be a war crime to bomb it at night... It would be a war crime to bomb it during the day when 350 people are praying". He further added that there is no other possible interpretation for what could have occurred other than a deliberate targeting of civilians. The report also reproduces a statement from the Israeli government concerning the attack, where the Israeli government both denies that the mosque was attacked and states that the casualties of the attack were Hamas operatives. The report says that the position of the Israeli government contains "apparent contradictions" and is "unsatisfactory" and "demonstrably false".

Zeitoun incident

According to interviews with family members, neighbors, Palestinian Red Crescent personnel, submissions from various NGOs and visits to the site, the extended al-Samouni family gathered together in one house after the fighting in the area was over, ordered there by Israeli soldiers patrolling their Gaza neighborhood of Zeytoun as part of the ground phase of the Gaza War; when five men stepped out of the house to collect firewood, a missile struck them, fired, possibly, from an Apache helicopter; several more missiles followed, this time aimed directly at the house. In all, 21 family members were killed, including women and children. When the surviving al-Samounis attempted to leave and make their way to Gaza City, they were told by an Israeli soldier to return to the house. In April 2011, Goldstone wrote that the shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image.

Al-Fakhura school incident

The report says that IDF's mortar shelling near a United Nations-run Al-Fakhura school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, which was sheltering some 1,300 people, killed 35 and wounded up to 40 people. The investigation did not exclude the possibility that Israeli forces were responding to fire from an armed Palestinian group, as Israel said, but said that this and similar attacks "cannot meet the test of what a reasonable commander would have determined to be an acceptable loss of civilian life for the military advantage sought". The mission criticized IDF for the choice of the weapons for the supposed counterstrike and concluded that the IDF fire at the Al-Fakhura street violated the law of proportionality.

Abd Rabbo family incident

According to the Mission's report, the committee found Khaled and Kawthar Abd Rabbo to be credible and reliable witnesses and it had no reason to doubt the veracity of the main elements of their testimony, which it says is consistent with the accounts it received from other eyewitnesses and NGOs. The report concludes that the Israeli soldiers deliberately shot at the family members, as they could not perceive any danger from the house, its occupants or the surroundings. The report bases its conclusion on the premise that the family, consisting of a man, a young and an elderly woman and three small girls, some of them waving white flags, stepped out of the house and stood still for several minutes waiting for instructions from the soldiers.

White phosphorus allegations

The report says that Israeli forces were "systematically reckless" in determining the use of white phosphorus in built-up areas. The writers highlighted the Israeli attack on the UN Relief and Works Agency compound in Gaza City on 15 January, the attack on the Al Quds hospital, and the attack on the Al Wafa hospital, each of which involved using white phosphorus. They described its use as disproportionate or excessive under international law

International law

Public international law concerns the structure and conduct of sovereign states; analogous entities, such as the Holy See; and intergovernmental organizations. To a lesser degree, international law also may affect multinational corporations and individuals, an impact increasingly evolving beyond...

. More generally, the UN report recommended that "serious consideration should be given to banning the use of white phosphorus in built-up areas.”

Human shields allegations

The report also accused Israel of using Palestinians as “human shields” and torturing detainees. The human shields accusations were supported in 2010, with Israel charging two soldiers with forcing a 9-year-old Palestinian boy to open bags suspected of containing bombs.

Accusations against Palestinian militants

The report also stated there is evidence that Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity by deliberately launching rockets and firing mortars into Israel, calculated to kill civilians and damage civilian structures. The report accused Palestinian armed groups of causing psychological trauma to the civilians within the range of the rockets. It also concluded that killings and abuses of members of the Fatah political movement amount to a “serious violation of human rights”.

The Mission, however, found no evidence of Palestinian armed groups placing civilians in areas where attacks were being launched; of engaging in combat in civilian dress; or of using a mosque for military purposes or to shield military activities. This statement contrasted with media reports that Hamas fighters wore civilian clothes and concealed their weapons. In March 2009, the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (Malam) published a report that included material supplied by the IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) as part of an effort to counter the Goldstone Report. It included videos and photographs reportedly showing that "dozens of mosques that were used by Hamas to store weapons, functioned as command centers or whose grounds were used to fire rockets into Israel."

While discussing an obligation of Palestinian armed groups to protect the civilian population in Gaza, the report notes that those interviewed in Gaza appeared reluctant to speak about the presence of or conduct of hostilities by the Palestinian armed groups. The Mission does not discount that the interviewees’ reluctance may have stemmed from a fear of reprisals. The report also criticized the treatment of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit

Gilad Shalit

, and called for his release.

Israel

The Israeli government issued an initial 32-point formal response to the fact-finding mission's report on 24 September 2009. The response listed a series of what it argued were serious flaws and biases in the report, finally concluding that the report perverts international law to serve a political agenda. (See below.)

Also in October 2009, Israel pressured the Palestinian president to postpone asking for a UN vote on the Goldstone report. Yuval Diskin

Yuval Diskin

Yuval Diskin was the 12th Director of Shabak .In the Israel Defense Forces, Diskin served as deputy company commander of Sayeret Shaked . In 1978, he was recruited to the Shabak and served as area coordinator for the Nablus district...

, head of the Israeli Shin Bet security service, met in Ramallah

Ramallah

Ramallah is a Palestinian city in the central West Bank located 10 kilometers north of Jerusalem, adjacent to al-Bireh. It currently serves as the de facto administrative capital of the Palestinian National Authority...

with President Mahmud Abbas and informed him that if Abbas refuses to ask to postpone the UN vote on the Goldstone report then Israel will turn the West Bank

West Bank

The West Bank ) of the Jordan River is the landlocked geographical eastern part of the Palestinian territories located in Western Asia. To the west, north, and south, the West Bank shares borders with the state of Israel. To the east, across the Jordan River, lies the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan...

into a "second Gaza": the Shin Bet chief told Abbas that if he did not ask for a deferral of the vote, Israel would withdraw permission for mobile phone company Wataniya to operate in the Palestinian Authority and threatened to revoke the easing of restrictions on movement within the West Bank that had been implemented earlier in 2009.

Israeli President

President of Israel

The President of the State of Israel is the head of state of Israel. The position is largely an apolitical ceremonial figurehead role, with the real executive power lying in the hands of the Prime Minister. The current president is Shimon Peres who took office on 15 July 2007...

Shimon Peres

GCMG is the ninth President of the State of Israel. Peres served twice as the eighth Prime Minister of Israel and once as Interim Prime Minister, and has been a member of 12 cabinets in a political career spanning over 66 years...

said that the report "makes a mockery of history" and that "it does not distinguish between the aggressor and the defender. War is crime and the attacker is the criminal. The defender has no choice. The Hamas terror organization is the one who started the war and also carried out other awful crimes. Hamas has used terrorism for years against Israeli children." Peres also stated that "the report gives de facto legitimacy to terrorist initiatives and ignores the obligation and right of every country to defend itself, as the UN itself had clearly stated." He added that the report "Failed to supply any other way for Hamas fire to stop. The IDF's operations have boosted the West Bank's economy, liberated Lebanon from Hezbollah terror and allowed Gazans to resume normalcy. The Israeli government withdrew (from Gaza) and Hamas began a murderous rampage, firing thousands of shells on women and children – innocent civilians, instead of rebuilding Gaza and caring for the population's welfare. (Hamas) builds tunnels and used civilians and children to shield terrorists and hide weapons."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu is the current Prime Minister of Israel. He serves also as the Chairman of the Likud Party, as a Knesset member, as the Health Minister of Israel, as the Pensioner Affairs Minister of Israel and as the Economic Strategy Minister of Israel.Netanyahu is the first and, to...

said: "The Goldstone Report is a field court-martial, and its findings were prewritten. This is a prize for terror. The report makes it difficult for democracies to fight terror." On another occasion, Netanyahu said that the report ignored Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza

Israel's unilateral disengagement plan

Israel's unilateral disengagement plan , also known as the "Disengagement plan", "Gaza expulsion plan", and "Hitnatkut", was a proposal by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, adopted by the government on June 6, 2004 and enacted in August 2005, to evict all Israelis from the Gaza Strip and from...

and the Palestinian rocket attacks

Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel

Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip have occurred since 2001. Between 2001 and January 2009, over 8,600 rockets had been launched, leading to 28 deaths and several hundred injuries, as well as widespread psychological trauma and disruption of daily life.The weapons,...

that preceded the war. He also warned world leaders that they and their anti-terror forces could be targets for charges similar to those in the report. At the United Nations General Assembly

United Nations General Assembly

For two articles dealing with membership in the General Assembly, see:* General Assembly members* General Assembly observersThe United Nations General Assembly is one of the five principal organs of the United Nations and the only one in which all member nations have equal representation...

, Netanyahu called the report biased and unjust, asking: "Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists? We must know the answer to that question now. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace."

Israeli Foreign Minister

Foreign Affairs Minister of Israel

The Foreign Affairs Minister of Israel is the political head of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The position is one of the most important in the Israeli cabinet after Prime Minister and Defense Minister...

Avigdor Lieberman said: "The Goldstone Commission is a commission established with the aim of finding Israel guilty of crimes ahead of time, [the commission] was dispatched by countries in which the terms 'human rights' and 'combat ethics' are unknown". He added that "the IDF was forced to deal with the lowest form of terrorists that set themselves the goal of killing women and children [by] hiding behind women and children. The state of Israel will continue to protect its citizens from the attacks of the terrorists and the terror organizations, and will continue to protect its soldiers from hypocritical and distorted attacks."

Preliminary analysis by Israel

The Government of Israel

Cabinet of Israel

The Cabinet of Israel is a formal body composed of government officials called ministers, chosen and led by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister must appoint members based on the distribution of votes to political parties during legislative elections, and its composition must be approved by a...

issued a 32-point preliminary analysis of the report, titled "Initial Response to Report of the Fact Finding Mission on Gaza Established Pursuant to Resolution S-9/1 of the Human Rights Council". The main arguments in the analysis were the following.

The analysis concludes that the report claims to represent international law but perverts it to serve a political agenda; that it sends a "legally unfounded message to states everywhere confronting terrorism that international law has no effective response to offer them", and that it signals to terrorist groups "that the cynical tactics of seeking to exploit civilian suffering for political ends actually pays dividends".

Palestinian National Authority

Following the postponing of the vote on the resolution in UNHRC, the Palestinian National Authority

Palestinian National Authority

The Palestinian Authority is the administrative organization established to govern parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip...

came under heavy criticism for agreeing to defer the draft proposal endorsing all recommendations of the UN Fact Finding Mission. Several Palestinian human rights organizations, condemning the PA's action, issued a statement under the title "Justice Delayed is Justice Denied". Abbas agreed to postpone the vote on the Goldstone report following a confrontational meeting with Yuval Diskin

Yuval Diskin

, head of the Israeli Shin Bet security service.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced on 4 October that a new committee would be established in order to investigate the circumstances surrounding the deferral of the UN vote on the Goldstone Report. Hamas officials in Gaza demanded Abu Mazen resignation for supporting the postponement of the vote at the UN Human Rights Council. Mahmoud al-Zahar

Mahmoud al-Zahar

Mahmoud al-Zahar is a co-founder of Hamas and a member of the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip. Since the formation of the Hamas/"Change and Reform" government in the Palestinian National Authority in March 2006, al-Zahar has served as foreign minister in the government of prime minister Ismail...

said that Abbas was guilty of "a very big crime against the Palestinian people" over the PA's conduct at UNHRC.

Palestinian representative to the United Nations Ibrahim Khraishi called the report unbiased and professionally compiled. He further added that "this report was important; what bothered some parties was that the report simply monitored international law, international humanitarian law and all relevant international instruments. This was not a political instrument that supported Palestine or Israel". He added the report was the first time killings of Palestinian civilians have been documented, and that his people would not forgive if those responsible were not punished.

Eleven Palestinian human rights organizations, including two based in Israel, called on the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government in Gaza to investigate Palestinian violations of international law allegedly committed during the Gaza War. Alleged violations include Palestinian attacks on civilians in Israel and instances of internal repression, such as summary executions in the Gaza Strip and arrests and torture in the West Bank. The letter asked to launch investigations before the 5 February deadline. The authors of the call said that for PLO efforts to have the report endorsed by the UN to be of lasting value, the Palestinian authorities must take action to implement its recommendations.

United Nations

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, endorsed the report and supported the call on Israel and Hamas to investigate and prosecute those who committed war crimes. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

Ban Ki-moon

Ban Ki-moon is the eighth and current Secretary-General of the United Nations, after succeeding Kofi Annan in 2007. Before going on to be Secretary-General, Ban was a career diplomat in South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the United Nations. He entered diplomatic service the year he...

urged "credible" investigations by both sides into the conduct of the Gaza conflict "without delay".

United States

Ambassador Susan Rice, the U.S. permanent representative to the UN, said: "We have very serious concerns about many recommendations in the report" State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said: "Although the report covers both sides of the conflict, it focuses overwhelmingly on Israel's actions", adding that Goldstone opted for 'cookie cutter conclusions' about Israel's actions, while keeping 'the deplorable actions of Hamas' to generalized remarks". The United States pledged to stand by Israel in the fight against the Goldstone report. U.S. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff told the Security Council that whereas the U.S. had "serious concerns" about the report's "unbalanced focus on Israel, the overly broad scope of its recommendations and its sweeping conclusions of law, it also took the allegations in the report seriously and encouraged Israel to conduct serious investigations.

A presidential advisor on Middle East policy told a group of American Jewish leaders in November 2010 that the U.S. government was committed to curbing actions by the UN on the Goldstone Report.

Shelley Berkley

Shelley Berkley

Rochelle "Shelley" Berkley is the U.S. Representative for , serving since 1999, and a candidate for U.S. Senate. She is a member of the Democratic Party.-Early life, education, and legal career:...

of Nevada and Eliot Engel of New York wrote in a joint statement: "Israel took every reasonable step to avoid civilian casualties ... It is ridiculous to claim that Israel did not take appropriate actions to protect civilian populations".

Perceived unwillingness on the part of the United States to act on the report was criticized by the Non-Aligned Movement

Non-Aligned Movement

The Non-Aligned Movement is a group of states considering themselves not aligned formally with or against any major power bloc. As of 2011, the movement had 120 members and 17 observer countries...

(NAM), which represents 118 nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights

Center for Constitutional Rights

Al Odah v. United States:Al Odah is the latest in a series of habeas corpus petitions on behalf of people imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The case challenges the Military Commissions system’s suitability as a habeas corpus substitute and the legality, in general, of detention at...

, Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, and Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch

. Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein is a Canadian author and social activist known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.-Family:...

stated that instead of proving its commitment to international law, the United States is smearing the "courageous" report.

House of Representatives resolution

On 3 November 2009, the United States House of Representatives

United States House of Representatives

The United States House of Representatives is one of the two Houses of the United States Congress, the bicameral legislature which also includes the Senate.The composition and powers of the House are established in Article One of the Constitution...

overwhelmingly passed a resolution, H. Res. 867 (344 for, 36 against), calling the report irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy. Howard Berman, one of the co-sponsors of the resolution, expressed several concerns:

*The commission’s report lacks context. It does not take account of the nature of Israel’s enemy – operating from the midst of civilian populations, committed to Israel’s destruction, and fully supported by state actors Iran and Syria.

*The report does not take into account the extent to which witnesses from Gaza were likely intimidated by Hamas.

*In general, the report is credulous of Hamas claims but skeptical of Israeli claims.

Goldstone and several U.S.-based rights groups denounced the resolution. Sarah Leah Whitson

Sarah Leah Whitson

Sarah Leah Whitson is an American human rights activist and director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch.-Early life and education :Whitson was reared by a mother who was born in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem's Old City...

, a director of Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch, commented that "this sort of resolution sends a terrible message to the international community about American willingness to believe in international justice for all. I hope that the members of Congress reject it. It's funny because it accuses the Goldstone Report of being one sided but it's not. It's this resolution that's one-sided and biased." HRW also maintained that the House resolution "has factual errors and would help shield from justice the perpetrators of serious abuses – both Israeli and Palestinian".

Europe

The European Parliament

European Parliament

The European Parliament is the directly elected parliamentary institution of the European Union . Together with the Council of the European Union and the Commission, it exercises the legislative function of the EU and it has been described as one of the most powerful legislatures in the world...

passed a resolution endorsing the Goldstone report in March 2010. The resolution called on the bloc's member states to "publicly demand the implementation of [the report's] recommendations and accountability for all violations of international law, including alleged war crimes." The French foreign ministry called the facts revealed by the report "extremely serious" and deserving of utmost attention. The French UN Ambassador Gérard Araud

Gerard Araud

Gérard Araud is the Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations. Before that he was Director General for Political and Security Affairs of the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, also known as Quai d’Orsay....

urged both sides to initiate "independent inquiries in line with international standards." Talking to Israeli television Channel 2, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is a member of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party . He was elected for two terms as Prime Minister of Spain, in the 2004 and 2008 general elections. On 2 April 2011 he announced he will not stand for re-election in 2012...

said that in any event, Spain would not seek to prosecute Israelis for alleged war crimes. Sweden's foreign minister Carl Bildt

Carl Bildt

, Honorary KCMG is a Swedish politician, diplomat and nobleman. Formerly Prime Minister of Sweden from 1991 to 1994 and leader of the liberal conservative Moderate Party from 1986 to 1999, Bildt has served as Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs since 6 October 2006...

said he supported the report, and called Israel's refusal to co-operate with the investigation a mistake. Bildt characterized Goldstone as a person with high integrity and credibility, and called his report worthy of consideration. At the time of Bildt's statement, Sweden held the rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union

Presidency of the Council of the European Union

The Presidency of the Council of the European Union is the responsibility for the functioning of the Council of the European Union that rotates between the member states of the European Union every six months. The presidency is not a single president but rather the task is undertaken by a national...

. At the UNHRC, Switzerland commented favourably on the impartiality of the findings in the 575-page report. The Swiss ambassador called on Israel and Hamas to conduct independent investigations into the allegations of war crimes. He also called for an independent expert panel to oversee legal procedures on both sides. Turkey, which holds a seat in the Security Council

United Nations Security Council

The United Nations Security Council is one of the principal organs of the United Nations and is charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. Its powers, outlined in the United Nations Charter, include the establishment of peacekeeping operations, the establishment of...

until the end of 2010, has voiced support for discussing the report to the Security Council. Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan called for "accountability" and said that guilty parties should be identified and face necessary sanctions. He also accused Israel of raining "phosphorus bombs ... on innocent children in Gaza". In an interview with an Israeli radio station, the British Ambassador to the United Nations, John Sawers, supported the findings of the report and called for both Israel and the Palestinians to investigate its conclusions. During the UN Security Council's meeting, he said that "the Goldstone Report itself did not adequately recognize Israel's right to protect its citizens, nor did it pay sufficient attention to Hamas's actions." Nevertheless, he further stressed the concerns raised in the report, which he said cannot be ignored. In October 2009 it was reported saying that Ehud Olmert, Israeli prime minister during the conflict, would "probably" face arrest should he visit the UK. Dutch foreign minister Maxime Verhagen said both Israel and the Palestinian Authority must investigate war crimes allegations, saying "there can be no impunity for serious human rights violations both on the Palestinian and the Israeli side". Verhagen also urged Israel to halt building settlements in the West Bank, calling the practice a serious obstacle to peace, which "will have to stop". As reported in Haaretz

Haaretz

Haaretz is Israel's oldest daily newspaper. It was founded in 1918 and is now published in both Hebrew and English in Berliner format. The English edition is published and sold together with the International Herald Tribune. Both Hebrew and English editions can be read on the Internet...

in April 2011, Labor Party Secretary-General Hilik Bar says that Norway's Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told him that Norway will reconsider their support for the report in light of Goldstone's recantation.

Asia and Africa

A Foreign Ministry spokesman said China had voted in favor of the report "in the hope of protecting the human rights of the people in the occupied Palestinian territories and to promote the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace process." Chinese members of parliament told a visiting delegation of the Israeli Parlament officials in Beijing that China will oppose discussing the Goldstone Commission's report at the UN Security Council and allowing the document to serve as a basis for law suits against Israel at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The Chinese parliamentarians stressed that the UNHRC had the necessary tools to look into the report without the involvement of other institutions. Manouchehr Mottaki

Manouchehr Mottaki

Manouchehr Mottaki is an Iranian politician and diplomat. He was the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs. Whilst technically appointed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he is considered to be closer to more pragmatic conservative factions and during the 2005 presidential election, he was the campaign...

, Iran's foreign minister, referred to the report when calling for legal action against the Israeli leadership saying that "the perpetrators of the Gaza war should stand before [an] international war crimes tribunal". The Nigerian ambassador to the UNHRC, Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi, said that he Council should not dilute its efforts by vilifying the Fact-Finding Mission members and parts of the report – no useful purpose would be served by compounding the human rights situation in the region through sheer rhetoric or failure to act. He said that "the implementation of the report was crucial to addressing the pernicious issues of impunity and accountability".

Organizations

The Arab League

Arab League

The Arab League , officially called the League of Arab States , is a regional organisation of Arab states in North and Northeast Africa, and Southwest Asia . It was formed in Cairo on 22 March 1945 with six members: Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan , Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Yemen joined as a...

called for implementation of the recommendations and Secretary General Amr Moussa

Amr Moussa

Amr Mohammed Moussa is an Egyptian politician and diplomat who was the Secretary-General of the Arab League, a 22-member forum representing Arab states, from 1 June 2001 until 1 June 2011. He is a candidate in the 2011 Egyptian presidential election....

stressed the its commitment to closely following up the situation and assuring implementation of Goldstone's recommendations to "prevent future assaults." On behalf of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Pakistani Ambassador Zamir Akram welcomed the fact-finding mission and thanked them for presenting a comprehensive and objective account. Discussing responding to allegations of war crimes, he said that "it was now the time for action; words needed to be converted into deeds". Speaking in the UNHRC, numerous states called the report "balanced".

Speaking on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement
Non-Aligned Movement
The Non-Aligned Movement is a group of states considering themselves not aligned formally with or against any major power bloc. As of 2011, the movement had 120 members and 17 observer countries...

(NAM), Egyptian Ambassador Hisham Badr welcomed the report, saying that those responsible for crimes should be brought to justice and called for an end to a "situation of impunity and defiance of the law".

Non-government organizations

Amnesty International

Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...

stated that Goldstone's findings were consistent with those of Amnesty’s own field investigation, and called on the UN to implement the recommendations. Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch

called the report a significant step toward justice and redress for the victims on both sides, and called on the Security Council

United Nations Security Council

to implement the report's recommendations.

Israeli human rights group B'Tselem

B'Tselem

B'Tselem is an Israeli non-governmental organization . It calls itself "The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories"...

, along with eight other Israeli human-rights NGOs, stated that they "expect the Government of Israel to respond to the substance of the report's findings and to desist from its current policy of casting doubt upon the credibility of anyone who does not adhere to the establishment's narrative." At the same time, leaders of B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence think that the Goldstone accusation of an assault on civilians is incorrect. The Executive Director of B'Tselem criticized some aspects of the report, particularly "very careful phrasing regarding Hamas abuses", such as lack of condemnation of mosques' misuses or human shielding, as well as supposedly sweeping conclusions regarding Israel. Yael Stein, research director of B’Tselem, said that she does not accept the Goldstone conclusion of a systematic attack on civilian infrastructure, which she found unconvincing. At the same time, she urged to check out every incident and every policy by an independent body, because in her view the military cannot check itself and it has to be explained why so many people had been killed.

The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) – the international affiliate of the American Center for Law and Justice – claimed in its analyses of the Report that among numerous flaws in it, the Mission misstated the International Humanitarian Law regarding the obligation of the fighters engaged in hostilities to distinguish themselves from the civilian population by uniform (perfidy violation per Article 37 of the Protocol I

Protocol I

Protocol I is a 1977 amendment protocol to the Geneva Conventions relating to the protection of victims of international armed conflicts. It reaffirms the international laws of the original Geneva Conventions of 1949, but adds clarifications and new provisions to accommodate developments in modern...

).

UN Watch

UN Watch

criticized Goldstone's report methodologies that allegedly dismissed or ignored much of the evidence provided in Israeli Government report from July 2009 on the one hand and on the other hand endorsed unquestionably testimonies by Gaza officials. Representatives of Simon Wiesenthal Center

Simon Wiesenthal Center

The Simon Wiesenthal Center , with headquarters in Los Angeles, California, was established in 1977 and named for Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter. According to its mission statement, it is "an international Jewish human rights organization dedicated to repairing the world one step at a time...

made similar charges.

Journalism

The Financial Times (UK) called the report balanced and criticized attacks on Goldstone. It argued, however, that Israeli objections to the UNHRC were on strong ground, stating that "council members from Libya

Libya

Libya is an African country in the Maghreb region of North Africa bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west....

to Angola

Angola

Angola, officially the Republic of Angola , is a country in south-central Africa bordered by Namibia on the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the north, and Zambia on the east; its west coast is on the Atlantic Ocean with Luanda as its capital city...

hide behind the Palestinian cause to deflect attention from their own records of serious human rights abuse".

The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...

wrote that Israel should open a parliamentary investigation after the model of the Kahan Commission

Kahan Commission

The Kahan Commission , formally known as the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut, was established by the Israeli government on 28 September 1982, to investigate the Sabra and Shatila Massacre . The Kahan Commission was chaired by the President of the Supreme Court,...

to look into its actions in Gaza. The paper wrote that "strong democratic nations are able to scrutinise their own behaviour, even in times of conflict. It is time for Israel to demonstrate its own democratic strength".

The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...

(UK) denounced the report as "deeply flawed" and detrimental to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, arguing that it was tainted by anti-Israel prejudice in the UNHRC. In particular, The Economist chastised the mission for saying there was little or no evidence showing Hamas endangered civilians by basing themselves around schools, mosques and hospitals, as the charge was supported by many reports in the public domain.

The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

(UK) criticized the report as "provocative bias" and described as dangerous and unreasonable the moral equivalence drawn in the report between Israel and Hamas. The Times praised Israel for quietly continuing to conduct its own investigation into the conflict despite the report, and concluded that Israel "is an accountable, democratic, transparent nation, and fighting to remain one amid challenges that few other nations ever have to face".

The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...

wrote that "...the Goldstone commission proceeded to make a mockery of impartiality with its judgment of facts. It concluded, on scant evidence, that "disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians were part of a deliberate policy" by Israel. At the same time it pronounced itself unable to confirm that Hamas hid its fighters among civilians, used human shields, fired mortars and rockets from outside schools, stored weapons in mosques, and used a hospital for its headquarters, despite abundant available evidence".

The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....

criticized the report, calling it a "new low" in United Nations bias on Israel-related matters. WSJ wrote that the commission's members "were forced to make some astonishing claims of fact" in order to reach some of their conclusions. In particular, WSJ criticized the report's claim that the Gaza police force was a "civilian" agency and its inability to establish Palestinian use of mosques for military purposes despite evidence to the contrary.

Military commentators

Colonel Richard Kemp

Richard Kemp

Colonel Richard Justin Kemp CBE served in the British Army from 1977 to 2005. He was Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, an infantry battalion Commanding Officer, worked for the Joint Intelligence Committee and COBR and completed 14 operational tours of duty around the globe.After retiring...

, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan

War in Afghanistan (2001–present)

The War in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, as the armed forces of the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Afghan United Front launched Operation Enduring Freedom...

, addressed the UNHRC at October 2009, speaking on behalf of UN Watch

UN Watch

. He said that Hamas is "adept at staging and distorting incidents" and asserted that during the conflict the Israel Defense Forces "did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare" and that Palestinian civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas' way of fighting, which involved using human shields as a matter of policy, and deliberate attempts to sacrifice their own civilians. He added that Israel took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, aborted potentially effective missions in order to prevent civilian casualties, and took "unthinkable" risks by allowing huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza during the fighting. Goldstone stated that Kemp was not interviewed "because the report did not deal with the issues he raised regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas".

Australian Major General Jim Molan

Jim Molan

Major General Andrew James Molan AO, DSC is a retired senior officer in the Australian Army.-Education:"Jim" Molan joined the Australian Army following completion of his schooling in Victoria. On graduating from the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1971 he was allocated to the Royal Australian...

(retired), who served as chief of operations of the Iraq multinational force in 2004–05, stated that "The Goldstone report is an opinion by one group of people putting forward their judgments, with limited access to the facts, and reflecting their own prejudices. The difference in tone and attitude in the report when discussing Israeli and Hamas actions is surprising." ... "as a soldier who has run a war against an opponent not dissimilar to Hamas, facing problems perhaps similar to those faced by Israeli commanders, my sympathies tend to lie with the Israelis." ... "But having stated my prejudice, I think I may be more honest than Goldstone, who seems to pass off his prejudices in a report that cannot be based on fact, and uses judicial language and credibility to do so. It comes down to equality of scepticism: if you refuse to believe anything the Israelis say, then you have no right to unquestioningly accept what Hamas says."

Legal commentators

Writing in the Financial Times

Financial Times

The Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....

Italian Jurist Antonio Cassese

Antonio Cassese

Antonio Cassese was an Italian jurist who specialized in public international law. He was formerly associated with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon which he presided over until his resignation on health grounds in 1 October 2011...

who was the first President of the International Criminal Tribunal For the Former Yugoslavia argued that critics of the report were relying primarily on ad hominem

Ad hominem

An ad hominem , short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it...

and strawman attacks. He argued that "critics have given inaccurate descriptions of the report’s findings" and that "those who claim the mission’s mandate was biased against Israel seem to have ignored a significant fact: Justice Goldstone, whose mission was initially asked to look into alleged violations only by Israel, demanded—and received—a change of mandate to include attacks by Hamas." Furthermore, he argued that many critics of the report "have launched personal attacks on Justice Goldstone’s character" and some critics have even gone as far as labeling Goldstone, who is Jewish, "an 'anti-Semite' of a kind who 'despise and hate our own people'”.

Former Canadian Minister of Justice, Attorney General of Canada, former president of the Canadian Jewish Congress

Canadian Jewish Congress

The Canadian Jewish Congress was one of the main lobby groups for the Jewish community in the country, although it often competed with the more conservative B'nai Brith Canada in that regard. At its dissolution, the president of the CJC was Mark Freiman. Its past co-presidents were Sylvain Abitbol...

and former Director of the Human Rights Program at McGill University

McGill University

Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...

Professor Irwin Cotler

Irwin Cotler

Irwin Cotler, PC, OC, MP was Canada's Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada from 2003 until the Liberal government of Paul Martin lost power following the 2006 federal election. He was first elected to the Canadian House of Commons for the constituency of Mount Royal in a by-election...

called the inquiry "inherently tainted", agreeing with Mary Robinson and Richard Goldstone that its original mandate was "deeply one-sided and flawed" prior to being broadened, and stating that the UNHRC is "systematically and systemically biased against Israel". He opposed the report, which he regarded as "tainted". At the same time, he is in favor of establishing an independent inquiry into the Gaza war, saying that Israel would set a precedent if it creates such an inquiry that according to his best knowledge "no other democracy" had.

Princeton

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

professor emeritus of international law Richard Falk, appointed in 2008 by the United Nations Human Rights Council

United Nations Human Rights Council

(UNHRC) to serve as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on "the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories

Palestinian territories

occupied since 1967", endorsed the report as "an historic contribution to the Palestinian struggle for justice, an impeccable documentation of a crucial chapter in their victimization under occupation". Writing in Electronic Intifada

Electronic Intifada

The Electronic Intifada is a not-for-profit, independent online publication which covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Palestinian perspective, "aimed at combating the pro-Israeli, pro-American spin" its editors believe exists in mainstream media accounts.-History:EI was founded by Ali...

, Falk further commented that the report appeared to him to be "more sensitive" to Israel's contentions that Hamas was guilty of war crimes, and that the report in many ways "endorses the misleading main line of the Israeli narrative". Falk was critical of charges that the report, or the UNHRC, were biased and inferred that such criticism amounted to an attempt to "avoid any real look at the substance of the charges".

York University

York University

York University is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's third-largest university, Ontario's second-largest graduate school, and Canada's leading interdisciplinary university....

scholar of human rights and humanitarian law Professor Anne Bayefsky

Anne Bayefsky

Anne Bayefsky is a human rights scholar and activist. She currently directs the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and a barrister and solicitor, Ontario Bar. Her areas of expertise include international human rights law, equality...

said that the report, which claims to be a human rights document, never mentions the racist, genocidal intent of the enemy, which Israel confronted after years of restraint. She added that the report relies on testimonies from witnesses speaking under circumstances that gave rise to "a fear of reprisals" from Hamas should they have dared to tell the truth.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz

Alan Dershowitz

Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. He has spent most of his career at Harvard Law School where in 1967, at the age of 28, he became the youngest full professor of law in its history...

wrote that the problem with the report is what its composers willfully and deliberately refused to see and hear. He said that the commission ignored easily accessible videotapes that show Hamas operatives routinely firing rockets from behind human shields, and the report dismissed eyewitness accounts published by reputable newspapers and admissions by Hamas leaders regarding Hamas military activities.

University of Toronto

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

professor of law Ed Morgan

Ed Morgan (professor)

Edward M. "Ed" Morgan is a professor of international law at the University of Toronto.-Education:Morgan attended Northwestern University , the University of Toronto , and Harvard Law School ....

wrote in the Toronto Star
Toronto Star
The Toronto Star is Canada's highest-circulation newspaper, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its print edition is distributed almost entirely within the province of Ontario...

that in dealing with the alleged use of human shielding of the Gaza civilian population by Hamas, the report "put its head in the sand", saying merely that "[t]he mission notes that those interviewed in Gaza appeared reluctant to speak about the presence of or conduct of hostilities by the Palestinian armed groups". The article also criticized the way the committee dismissed first-hand evidences from IDF soldiers implying that mosques were used as launching points for Hamas attacks and as weapons storage facilities."

Professor Daniel Friedmann

Daniel Friedmann

Daniel Friedmann was the Minister of Justice of Israel from 2007 to 2009. A professor of law, he was appointed by PM Ehud Olmert. He was sworn in on February 7, 2007, succeeding Tzipi Livni. In 2009 he was succeeded by Ya'akov Ne'eman.-Early life:...

, who served as the Justice Minister of Israel

Justice Minister of Israel

The Justice Minister of Israel is the political head of the Israeli Ministry of Justice and a position in the Israeli cabinet. The current minister is Ya'akov Ne'eman, an independent who is not a member of the Knesset....

during the Gaza War, criticized what he called the "reinterpretation" of evidence unfavorable to Hamas. As an example, he cites the statement of the Hamas police force spokesman saying that "police officers received clear orders from the leadership to face the [Israeli] enemy". He says that the committee uncritically accepted the explanation that the intention was that in the event of an invasion, the police would continue to uphold public order and ensure the movement of essential supplies.

Writing in the JURIST

JURIST

JURIST is an online legal news service hosted by the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, powered by a staff of more than 40 law students working in Pittsburgh and other US locations under the direction of founding Publisher & Editor-in-Chief Professor Bernard Hibbitts, Research Director Jaclyn...

, Laurie Blank of Emory Law's International Humanitarian Law Clinic and Gregory Gordon of the University of North Dakota School of Law said that the Goldstone Report's major flaw is that it fails the law. In their view, the Report incorrectly claims Israel disproportionately attacked civilians by relying on information gathered after the fact and discounting contemporaneous Israeli intentions or actions and the surrounding circumstances; the Report unjustly accuses Israel of a disproportionate response to eight years of Hamas's attacks, unfairly presenting Operation Cast Lead as disproportionate overall; the Report treats Israel and Hamas disproportionately by holding them to different standards, merely suggesting that Hamas's actions "would constitute" legal violations.

Other

Noam Shalit, father of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit

Gilad Shalit

held captive by Hamas, urged the UN to take all possible measures to implement the Goldstone report's recommendations on the status of his son. The Goldstone report calls for the immediate release of Gilad Shalit and, while Shalit is in captivity, for access to him by the International Red Cross.

Residents of southern Israel who testified before the commission regarding Palestinian rocket attacks

Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel

on the region said that their testimonies were largely ignored.

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

argued that the Goldstone report is biased in favour of Israel since the report failed to question Israel's contention that it was acting in self-defence. Chomsky stressed that the right to self-defence requires that peaceful means are first exhausted before resorting to military force, something Israel "did not even contemplate doing".

The Trades Union Congress

Trades Union Congress

The Trades Union Congress is a national trade union centre, a federation of trade unions in the United Kingdom, representing the majority of trade unions...

(TUC), the main federation of trade unions in the United Kingdom, "welcomed" the findings of the report.

J street

J Street

J Street is a nonprofit liberal advocacy group based in the United States whose stated aim is to promote American leadership to end the Arab-Israeli and Israel-Palestinian conflicts peacefully and diplomatically. It was founded in April 2008....

, a Liberal Jewish lobby in the United States, called on Israel to establish an independent state commission of inquiry to investigate the accusations detailed in the report.

Richard Landes

Richard Landes

Richard Allen Landes is an American historian and author, specializing in Millennialism. He currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Boston University...

, who also maintains the "Understanding the Goldstone Report" site, published in the December 2009 volume of the Israeli MERIA

Middle East Review of International Affairs

Middle East Review of International Affairs is a quarterly journal on Middle East issues edited by Barry Rubin and published by the Global Research in International Affairs Center of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, which he also owns and directs.The GLORIA Center also publishes...

Journal critical analyses of the Goldstone report. Landes argued that the report fails to investigate seriously the problem of Hamas embedding its war effort in the midst of civilian infrastructure in order to draw Israeli fire and then accuse Israel of war crimes; the report is credulous concerning all Palestinian claims, contrasted with a corresponding skepticism of all Israeli claims; the report harshly judges Israel for war crimes, contrasted with its resolute agnosticism concerning Hamas intentions. Landes concluded that Goldstone actually participates in Hamas' strategy, which, according to Landes, encourages the sacrificing of their own civilians.

In an interview on the independent U.S. news broadcaster Democracy Now, Norman Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein

Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...

questioned the way the report judged the events in Gaza based on the laws of war

Laws of war

The law of war is a body of law concerning acceptable justifications to engage in war and the limits to acceptable wartime conduct...

, saying that Gaza did not meet the criteria of a war zone, calling it instead a "massacre". He went on to say that there was no fighting in Gaza, and referred to quotes from the testimonies of the Israeli soldiers published in the report by NGO Breaking the Silence. Concerning the substance of the report, Finkelstein says the Goldstone report is in-line with reports compiled by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in the findings that Israel had targeted civilians and the Palestinian infrastructure.

Mission members' responses to criticism

Goldstone dismissed accusations of anti-Israel bias in his report as "ridiculous" and invited "fair minded people" to read the report and "at the end of it, point out where it failed to be objective or even-handed". Speaking in the UNHRC, Goldstone rejected what he called a "barrage of criticism" about his findings and said the answers to such criticism are in the findings of the report. Goldstone said that the United States, for example, had failed to substantiate its charges that the report was biased. In an interview with Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera is an independent broadcaster owned by the state of Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation and headquartered in Doha, Qatar...

, Goldstone challenged the Obama administration to identify the flaws the U.S. said it has found in the report. Alan Dershowitz

Alan Dershowitz

in his analyses of the Report responded that as of January 2010 Goldstone had generally refused to reply substantively to credible critics of the Report and declined Dershowitz's offer to publicly debate Goldstone about its contents. Goldstone referred to his experiences of South Africa to reject Israeli PM Netanyahu's arguments that the report would make peacemaking more difficult, saying that "truth-telling and acknowledgement to victims can be a very important assistance to peace".

In an interview with the Jewish Forward, published on 7 October 2009, Goldstone emphasized that his task was to conduct a "fact-finding mission" and not an "investigation." He acknowledged the reliance on Palestinian (Gazan and Hamas) testimonies, noting his mission cross-checked those accounts against each other and sought corroboration from photos, satellite photos, contemporaneous reports, forensic evidence and the mission’s own inspections of the sites in question. He further acknowledged that "We had to do the best we could with the material we had. If this were a court of law there would have been nothing proven. ... I would not consider it in any way embarrassing if many of the allegations turn out to be disproved."

Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...

published a brief telephone interview with Desmond Travers in which he was asked to respond to criticism of the mission and the report. He rejected the criticism that insufficient weight was given to the difficulties of fighting in the urban environment, and said that he was surprised by what he called "the intensity and viciousness of the personal attacks aimed at members of the Mission". He also said that the mission found no evidence that mosques were used to store munitions; in two cases investigated, neither was used as anything but a place of worship. He added that he had seen no credible criticism of the report itself or of the information in it.

Travers' statement regarding the use of mosques was challenged by a researcher at JCPA Colonel (res.) Halevi. Halevi said that the use of mosques as munition storage is supported by photographs of weapons seized in the Salah a-Din mosque in Gaza City during the operation, and the committee did not explain why it chose to disregard the information completely.

Human Rights Council

The vote for the UNHRC resolution endorsing the report was delayed on 2 October 2009 until the council's meeting in March 2010, after Palestinian delegation dropped its support for a resolution, apparently under heavy U.S. pressure. But on 11 October, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called on the UN Human Rights Council to hold a special session to endorse the Goldstone Report. UN officials announced that the UN Human Rights Council would reopen the debate about the report's findings on 15 October. UN Watch

UN Watch

issued a statement saying that the announced special Council's session would be a gross abuse of the procedures. On 15 October, the UNHRC endorsed the report, a move that sends it on to more powerful UN bodies for action. The resolution to the council condemned Israeli human rights violations in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, as well as chastised Israel for failing to cooperate with the UN mission. The resolution text also calls on the council to endorse the Goldstone Report, however the resolution explicitly mentions only Israeli violations of international law. 25 of the UNHRC members, mostly developing and Islamic countries, voted in favour of the resolution; the United States and 5 European countries opposed; 11 mostly European and African countries abstained, and Britain, France, and 3 other members of the 47-nation body declined to vote. The "unbalanced focus" of the ratification was criticized by U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly and U.S. ambassador to the UNHRC Douglas Griffiths.

Israeli officials rejected the UN Human Rights Council decision to endorse the report. Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi, Hamas, and Palestinian Authority representatives welcomed the vote.

The report was adopted by a vote of 25 in favour, 6 against, and 11 abstentions at a meeting held on 16 October 2009. The vote was as follows:

Goldstone criticized the United Nations Human Rights Council resolution for targeting only Israel, and failing to include Hamas: "This draft resolution saddens me as it includes only allegations against Israel. There is not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done in the report. I hope that the council can modify the text".

On 13 April 2011, the UNHCR recommended that the General Assembly reconsider the report at its sixty-sixth session (to be held in September 2011), and urges the Assembly to submit that report to the Security Council for its consideration and appropriate action, including consideration of referral of the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, pursuant to article 13 (b) of the Rome Statute. The resolution was drafted by the Palestinian Authority and adopted by the Human Rights Council with 27 states voting in favour, three against, and 16 abstentions. It followed the second report of a Committee of Independent Experts, established to monitor the domestic investigations into violations committed during the conflict, which was submitted to the Human Rights Council on 18 March 2011. The report concurred with Amnesty International’s assessment that – more than 18 months since the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict documented crimes under international law committed by both sides – the Israeli authorities and the Hamas de facto administration have failed to conduct investigations meeting the required international standards of independence, impartiality, thoroughness, effectiveness and promptness. The General Assembly has already twice called on the domestic authorities to conduct credible, independent investigations into the serious violations of international humanitarian and international human rights law documented by the UN Fact-Finding Mission, in resolutions adopted in November 2009 and February 2010. Those calls appear to have been ignored meaning that the General Assembly would be entitled to submit the issue to the Security Council.

General Assembly

The United Nations General Assembly

United Nations General Assembly

endorsed a resolution calling for independent investigations to be conducted by Israel and Hamas on allegations of war crimes described in the Goldstone report. The resolution was passed by overwhelming numbers with 114 in favour and 18 against, and 44 abstentions. The resolution calls on the UN Secretary General to report to the General Assembly within three months "with a view to considering further action, if necessary, by the relevant United Nations organs and bodies", and to send the report to the Security Council

United Nations Security Council

. The resolution enjoyed wide support among the Non-Aligned Movement bloc and the Arab bloc that comprise a majority of 120 votes. Most developing countries voted in favor. The countries that voted against the resolution were: Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

, Italy, the Marshall Islands

Marshall Islands

The Republic of the Marshall Islands , , is a Micronesian nation of atolls and islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just west of the International Date Line and just north of the Equator. As of July 2011 the population was 67,182...

, Federated States of Micronesia

Federated States of Micronesia

The Federated States of Micronesia or FSM is an independent, sovereign island nation, made up of four states from west to east: Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei and Kosrae. It comprises approximately 607 islands with c...

, Nauru

Nauru

Nauru , officially the Republic of Nauru and formerly known as Pleasant Island, is an island country in Micronesia in the South Pacific. Its nearest neighbour is Banaba Island in Kiribati, to the east. Nauru is the world's smallest republic, covering just...

, the Netherlands, Palau

Palau

Palau , officially the Republic of Palau , is an island nation in the Pacific Ocean, east of the Philippines and south of Tokyo. In 1978, after three decades as being part of the United Nations trusteeship, Palau chose independence instead of becoming part of the Federated States of Micronesia, a...

, Panama

Panama

Panama , officially the Republic of Panama , is the southernmost country of Central America. Situated on the isthmus connecting North and South America, it is bordered by Costa Rica to the northwest, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The...

, Poland, Slovakia

Slovakia

The Slovak Republic is a landlocked state in Central Europe. It has a population of over five million and an area of about . Slovakia is bordered by the Czech Republic and Austria to the west, Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east and Hungary to the south...

, The Republic of Macedonia

Republic of Macedonia

Macedonia , officially the Republic of Macedonia , is a country located in the central Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe. It is one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, from which it declared independence in 1991...

, Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

and the United States. Some European countries, namely Albania

Albania

Albania , officially known as the Republic of Albania , is a country in Southeastern Europe, in the Balkans region. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea...

, Belarus

Belarus

Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...

, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina , sometimes called Bosnia-Herzegovina or simply Bosnia, is a country in Southern Europe, on the Balkan Peninsula. Bordered by Croatia to the north, west and south, Serbia to the east, and Montenegro to the southeast, Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost landlocked, except for the...

, Cyprus

Cyprus

Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

, Ireland, Portugal, Malta

Malta

Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...

, Serbia

Serbia

Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...

, Slovenia

Slovenia

Slovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...

and Switzerland, voted in favor of the resolution. Other European countries, including the United Kingdom, France and Spain, abstained.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the vote showed that Israel has a "moral majority", adding: "[we] are pleased that 18 democratic 'premier league' states voted in line with Israel's position, while 44 South American and African states abstained". The Palestinian ambassador to the UN stated that "the General Assembly sent a powerful message", adding that if Israelis do not comply, "we will go after them."

The General Assembly passed a second resolution on 26 February 2010 to call once more for credible investigations into war crimes allegations detailed in the report, giving both sides five months to report on their investigations. The resolution was passed by a vote of 98–7 with 31 abstentions, with several European countries changing their vote from against to abstaining or from abstaining to supporting relative to the first resolution. Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak

Miroslav Lajcák

Dr. Miroslav Lajčák is a Slovak diplomat.Lajčák is a law graduate from the Comenius University in Bratislava. He holds a Ph.D. in international relations from the State Institute of International Relations in Moscow and is also a graduate of the George C...

attributed the change in voting partly to a negative reaction in Europe to an assassination

Assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

The assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, took place on January 19, 2010, in a Dubai hotel room. Al-Mabhouh—a co-founder of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Islamist Palestinian militant group Hamas—was wanted by the Israeli government for the kidnapping and murder of two...

carried out in Dubai, which was largely been blamed on Israel.

Security Council

Libya requested an emergency session of the UN Security Council on 7 October to consider the content of the report by UNHRC fact-finding mission. The request was rejected, but the Security Council agreed to advance its periodical meeting on the Middle East from 20 October to 14 October and to discuss the war crimes allegations raised in the report. The report became the focus of the Security Council's monthly Mideast meeting on 14 October. Council diplomats say there is little chance that the Security Council will take any action, primarily because of objections by the United States, which said the report should be handled by the Human Rights Council. All of the permanent members of the Security Council, which wield veto powers, oppose involving the Security Council in the report.

The ICC Prosecutor could seek a determination from the Judges of the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber on whether he can open an investigation into crimes committed during the conflict on the basis of a declaration issued by the Palestinian Authority in January 2009. That declaration accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC over crimes “committed on the territory of Palestine since 1 July 2002.” Legal experts dispute whether the Palestinian Authority is a “state” capable of making such a declaration under the Rome Statute. If the judges were to determine that the ICC could act on the declaration, a referral by the Security Council would not be required for the ICC to open an investigation. The ICC Prosecutor has not yet sought such a determination.

Israeli internal investigations

The UNHRC Mission's report recommended that both sides in the conflict open credible independent investigations into their own actions. The Israeli military opened about 100 internal investigations into its actions during the conflict, of which about 20 were criminal. The Prime Minister's Office released a statement on 24 October stating that the Israel Defense Forces had investigated most of the incidents and accusations of human rights abuses mentioned in the report. Goldstone and human rights organizations said it was insufficient for the military to investigate itself, and the United States urged Israel to mount an independent inquiry. Goldstone also stated that an independent investigation in Israel "would really be the end of the matter, as far as Israel is concerned".

In October, support grew within Israel for the launch of an independent inquiry, although the IDF and Defense Ministry argued that it would discredit the military's own internal investigations. That month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the establishment of a commission headed by Justice Minister Yaakov Ne'eman that would reassemble and reevaluate material gathered by the IDF to ensure that the investigations were thorough and that no facts were covered up. According to the report, the team would not question soldiers and officers.

Two professors, Moshe Halbertal and Avi Sagi, called for further investigation of incidents of Israeli troops opening fire on civilians carrying white flags, the destruction of homes in the final days of the operation and the destruction of power stations and water facilities. Former Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak

Aharon Barak

Aharon Barak is a Professor of Law at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya and a lecturer in law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Yale Law School, and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law....

advised the Attorney General to establish a state committee endowed with investigative and subpoena powers to look into the claims raised by the Goldstone report. The chief legal officer of the IDF, Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, advocated establishing a commission of inquiry to respond to the Goldstone report, which she described as "very, very damaging" to Israel's international standing. She argued that an inquiry was needed to provide Israel with arguments that it had complied with the report's recommendations, rather than to uncover actual war crimes.

In January 2010, the Israeli military completed a rebuttal to the Goldstone report. The IDF affirmed that Gaza’s sole flour mill was hit by tank shells in the course of a firefight with Hamas and that it was a legitimate military target because Hamas fighters were allegedly in its vicinity. The Goldstone Report informed that the mill had been hit by an aircraft bomb. Moreover, the Israeli military denied that the mill was a pre-planned target. (Photographs taken by a UN team to which The Guardian had access reportedly show, however, that the remains of a 500-pound Mk82 aircraft-dropped bomb were found in the midst of the mill's ruins. ) Israel said it would present UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon with its response to the Goldstone report by 28 January to meet the 5 February deadline set by the UN General Assembly. Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi pushed for the establishment of a judicial investigative panel to review the internal IDF investigations and determine whether the investigations were thorough.

In January 2010, eight human rights organizations in Israel reissued a call to the government to establish an independent and impartial investigation. The call was issued by Adalah, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, B'Tselem, Gisha, Hamoked, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Yesh Din and Rabbis for Human Rights.

In April 2010, Human Rights Watch released a 62-page report on Israels and Hamas' investigations. Concerning Israel, HRW reported that Israel had until that point failed to conduct a credible and independent investigation into the alleged war crimes in Gaza. "Israel's investigations into serious laws-of-war violations by its forces during last year's Gaza war lack thoroughness and credibility", HRW said in a release. In July 2010 Israel released second response to the report. Several soldiers were charged with misconduct, including manslaughter charges against a soldier for shooting at Palestinian women carrying white flags, as well as charges against use of a boy as a human shield. Brigadier General Eyal Eisenberg

Eyal Eisenberg

General-Major Eyal Eisenberg is a general in the Israel Defense Forces; currently the head of the Home Front Command. He led the Israel Defense Forces Gaza Division during the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict....

and Colonel Ilan Malca were reprimanded for authorizing an artillery attack which hit a UN compound.

Hamas claims

Addressing the report's allegations, initially a Hamas spokesman in Gaza said that the rockets fired at Israel were in self-defense, and were not intended to target civilians: "We were targeting military bases, but the primitive weapons make mistakes". In what the Associated Press called "a rare deviation from Hamas' violent ideology", Hamas also initially said it regretted killing Israeli civilians. Ahmed Assaf, a spokesman for the rival Palestinian party Fatah

Fatah

Fataḥ is a major Palestinian political party and the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization , a multi-party confederation. In Palestinian politics it is on the left-wing of the spectrum; it is mainly nationalist, although not predominantly socialist. Its official goals are found...

, said he was "stunned" at the apology, and said Hamas should instead apologize rather to fellow Palestinians for the deaths and injuries Hamas caused during its violent struggle with Fatah

Fatah-Hamas conflict

The Fatah–Hamas conflict , also referred to as the Palestinian Civil War , and the Conflict of Brothers , i.e...

over control in Gaza in 2007, which he called a "bloody coup".

HRW rejected Hamas's claim:

Hamas' claim that rockets were intended to hit Israeli military targets and only accidentally harmed civilians is belied by the facts. Civilians were the target, deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime.

HRW deputy Middle East director Joe Stork

Joe Stork

Joe Stork is an American political activist and Deputy Director for Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch. He holds an M.A. in International Affairs/Middle East Studies from Columbia University.-Career:...

stated: "Hamas can spin the story and deny the evidence, but hundreds of rockets rained down on civilian areas in Israel where no military installations were located." The Associated Press

Associated Press

The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...

noted that "Hamas fired hundreds of rockets toward Israeli towns and cities during the fighting, killing three Israeli civilians".

Several days later, Hamas retracted its apology, stating that its statement had been incorrectly interpreted. According to Gaza analyst Naji Sharrab, Hamas's retraction was likely a result of public pressure on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. "They are addressing two different audiences," Sharrab said of Hamas.

In April 2010, HRW reported that Hamas had not conducted any credible investigations at all. "Hamas has punished no one for ordering or carrying out hundreds of deliberate or indiscriminate rocket attacks into Israeli cities and towns", HRW said in a release.

UN Panel assessment

In September 2010, A UN Human Rights Council panel said Israel and Hamas had failed to conduct credible and adequate investigations into the war crimes allegations contained in the Goldstone report. The panel said Israel only investigated low-ranking officials and failed to investigate the role of "officials at the highest levels", while Hamas was criticised for not making serious efforts to investigate.

Future ramifications

It has been suggested by some states, individuals, organisations and media outlets that the Goldstone report may have ramifications for other present and future conflicts, particularly conflicts between states and non-state actors such as terrorist organisations.

Israel has said that the Goldstone report poses a challenge to the ability of states to defend themselves against terrorism, and warned that similar allegations could be made against other militaries fighting in comparable circumstances. In a statement released by Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Israel claims that the report "[t]ies the hands of democratic countries fighting terror worldwide" and "[p]romotes criminal proceedings against forces confronting terrorism in foreign states." Following statements by the United Kingdom's Ambassador to Israel calling upon Israel to investigate the allegations contained in the report, Israeli officials reportedly responded that "[i]f a precedent is set of Israelis being prosecuted for acts during the Gaza war, Britons could also be placed in the dock for actions in Iraq and Afghanistan." Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu

, in an interview broadcast on Israel's Channel 10, said that "... countries that are fighting terrorism must understand that this report hurts not only us but them as well. It hurts peace. It hurts security."

Opinion and editorial pieces expressing similar views have been published in a variety of newspapers and media outlets in the U.S. and Israel, some claiming that American and European military forces could be subject to similar criticism for their operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

An article published by the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

said that the fact that the Goldstone report might have consequences for countries fighting terrorists that hide among civilians "may have been a consideration for the U.S. and some NATO countries that either voted against the UN resolution or abstained [at the General Assembly vote]." The article concludes by stating that human rights groups note that the report has reinforced efforts to tackle issues of impunity and lack of accountability for war crimes.

In an interview conducted by Al-Jazeera, American Professor of law and former Lieutenant Colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces Amos N. Guiora

Amos N. Guiora

Amos N. Guiora is an Israeli-American professor of law at The S. J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah, and an expert on drone attacks.-Education:...

and Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti

Mustafa Barghouti

Mustafa Barghouti is a Palestinian democracy activist. He was a candidate for the presidency of the Palestinian National Authority in 2005, finishing second to Mahmoud Abbas, with 19% of the vote.Barghouti was born in Jerusalem...

both stated that they believed that the Goldstone report would have massive ramifications for the United States and other countries involved in military conflicts. According to Guiora the report "[minimizes] the nation-state's right to self-defence" and "raises extraordinarily important questions for American policymakers and for American commanders presently engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq and that same question is true with respect to other armies."

On 26 February 2010, in testimony before the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, U.S. Secretary of State

United States Secretary of State

Hillary Clinton "admitted that the report was problematic for the United States and other countries, which face the same type of war on terrorism coming out of populated areas." She also warned that if the Goldstone report were to set the international standards, the U.S. and many other countries might be accused of war crimes for their military operations.

In the wake of the report, and following receipt of material from South African, International Criminal Court

International Criminal Court

prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo stated he was considering opening an investigation into whether Lt. Col. David Benjamin, an IDF reserve officer, allowed war crimes to be committed during the Gaza war. Benjamin served in the Military Advocate General's international law department, but was actually abroad for most of the period of the conflict and already retired from active duty. Because of his dual Israeli-South African citizenship, he is according to Moreno Ocampo within the jurisdiction of the ICC.

The European Initiative, a pro-Israeli group, lodged an itemized legal complaint with the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office and demanded that the top Hamas leadership in Gaza and Damascus be prosecuted for war crimes. The plaintiffs are Israelis who hold Belgian citizenship and live in the Gaza periphery communities that have been targeted by rockets. The suit is based on the Goldstone Report, as well as on reports by B’Tselem and Amnesty International.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, wrote that the even-handed and impartial approach of the team led by Goldstone is indispensable in preventing future human-rights violations and in establishing a solid base for peace and security.

Goldstone's retraction of civilian targeting claim

On April 1, 2011 Goldstone published a piece in the Washington Post titled 'Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes'. Goldstone noted that the subsequent investigations by Israel and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report "indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy" while "the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying." The other principal authors of the UN report, Hina Jilani

Hina Jilani

, Christine Chinkin

Christine Chinkin

and Desmond Travers

Desmond Travers

, have rejected Goldstone's reassessment arguing that there is "no justification for any demand or expectation for reconsideration of the report as nothing of substance has appeared that would in anyway change the context, findings or conclusions of that report with respect to any of the parties to the Gaza conflict".

Goldstone's statement

Goldstone further expressed regret "that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes." Goldstone's revised view concerned the intentional targeting of civilians, not other war crimes alleged in the report to have been committed by Israel. Such other crimes included causing civilian casualties by using a disproportionate level of force and attacks on buildings concerning which there was no indication they were legitimate military targets.

In acknowledging the history of anti-Israel bias of the UN Human Rights Council, Goldstone added: "That comparatively few Israelis have been killed by the unlawful rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in no way minimizes the criminality. The U.N. Human Rights Council should condemn these heinous acts in the strongest terms."

Goldstone wrote that "If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document." He said that the lack of Israeli cooperation had meant that no Israeli officers were interviewed during the writing of the report. In hindsight, incidents which had been interpreted as the deliberate targeting of civilians may have had other explanations, such as poor intelligence information. Goldstone also praised Israel for investigating claims of war crimes while faulting Hamas for its failure to launch any investigations of its own forces. Goldstone commended Israel for responding to his report by revising military procedures to e.g. limit the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas.

Goldstone also expressed that he initially hoped the "inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted".

Reactions

Response in Israel to Goldstone's reappraisal of the report was harsh with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu releasing a statement saying that the report should be thrown "into the dustbin of history" and Jerusalem Post editor David Horovitz writing that Goldstone had "produced a report that has caused such irreversible damage to Israel’s good name" that the very least that Goldstone now owes Israel "is to work unstintingly from now on to try to undo the damage he has caused".
UN human rights council spokesman Cedric Sapey stated "The UN will not revoke a report on the basis of an article in a newspaper. The views Mr Goldstone expressed are his own personal views." Sapey explained "A move to change or withdraw the report would either require a formal written complaint from Goldstone, backed unanimously by his three fellow authors, or a vote by the UN general assembly or the human rights council".
However, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri dismissed Goldstone's remarks saying that "his retreat does not change the fact war crimes had been committed against 1.5 million people in Gaza," while Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad aL-Malki said Goldstone's comments did not change a thing and that "The report was as clear as the crimes that Israel committed during the war".

Hina Jilani, one of the four writers of the "Goldstone Report", noted when asked if the report should allegedly be changed: "Absolutely not; no process or acceptable procedure would invalidate the UN Report; if it does happen, it would be seen as a 'suspect move'." Also another of the four co-writer's, Irish international criminal investigations expert Desmond Travers, noted: 'the tenor of the report in its entirety, in my opinion, stands'. Also Goldstone maintained that, although the one correction should be made, he had "no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time" and that he didn't plan to pursue nullifying the report.

Human rights organizations said that much of the report remained valid.

American Jewish Committee

American Jewish Committee

The American Jewish Committee was "founded in 1906 with the aim of rallying all sections of American Jewry to defend the rights of Jews all over the world...

(AJC) Executive Director, David Harris, said that "Judge Goldstone should apologize to the State of Israel for the accusations of intentionally targeting civilians, which he now admits were unfounded. He should present his updated conclusions to the UN Human Rights Council, as well as to the General Assembly, which endorsed the skewed report, and press for its rejection."

In addition, NGO Monitor

NGO Monitor

President Professor Gerald Steinberg said "with Goldstone's admission that 'our fact-finding mission had no evidence' and that 'civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy,' the politicized NGOs that supplied these allegations have been exposed again as biased and lacking credibility. As NGO Monitor demonstrated when the report was released, the so-called 'evidence' provided by these groups was at the core of the political war against Israel."

Statement issued by other members of UN mission

On the 14th of April 2011 the other three authors of the Goldstone report released a statement regarding Goldstones article in the Washington post.Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers claimed that "in recent days some articles and comments appearing in the press with respect to the report of the United Nations (UN) fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008-2009 have misrepresented facts in an attempt to delegitimise the findings of this report and to cast doubts on its credibility".

The 3 co authors of the report wanted to address the "aspersions cast on the findings of the report and challenge them. Members of the mission, signatories to this statement, find it necessary to dispel any impression that subsequent developments have rendered any part of the mission's report unsubstantiated, erroneous or inaccurate".

Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers claimed there is "no justification for any demand or expectation for reconsideration of the report as nothing of substance has appeared that would in any way change the context, findings or conclusions of that report with respect to any of the parties to the Gaza conflict. Indeed, there is no UN procedure or precedent to that effect".

They stated that "The report of the fact-finding mission contains the conclusions made after diligent, independent and objective consideration of the information related to the events within our mandate, and careful assessment of its reliability and credibility. We firmly stand by these conclusions".

They concluded that Israel and Hamas have yet to establish a convincing basis for any claims that contradict the findings of the mission's report contradicting Goldstones claims.

They pointed out that "many of those calling for the nullification of our report imply that the final report by the follow-up committee's two members, Judge Mary McGowan Davis and Judge Lennart Aspergren, presented to the human rights council in March 2011, somehow contradicts the fact-finding mission's report or invalidates it.

In the light of the observations of this committee such claims are completely misplaced, and a clear distortion of their findings".

They criticized the findings of the Israeli inquiries. "The committee's report states that, according to available information, Israel has conducted some 400 command investigations into allegations by the fact-finding mission and other organisations. Command investigations are operational, not legal, inquiries and are conducted by personnel from the same command structure as those under investigation. Out of these, the committee reports that 52 criminal investigations into allegations of wrongdoings have been opened. Of these, three have been submitted for prosecution, with two of them resulting in convictions (one for theft of a credit card, resulting in a sentence of seven months' imprisonment, and another for using a Palestinian child as a human shield, which resulted in a suspended sentence of three months). The third case, related to allegations of deliberate targeting of an individual waving a white flag, is still ongoing".

"The committee has expressed serious concerns about the late start and slow pace of the proceedings, their insufficient transparency and the participation of victims and witnesses. Out of the 36 incidents relating to Gaza described in the fact-finding mission report, more than one third remain unresolved or without a clear status over two years after the conflict. The committee concluded that the slow progress could seriously impair the effectiveness of the investigations and prospects of achieving justice and accountability. Therefore, the mechanisms that are being used by the Israeli authorities to investigate the incidents are proving inadequate to genuinely ascertain the facts and any ensuing legal responsibility".

The authors also stated that "In addition, with regard to the issue of the policies guiding Operation Cast Lead, the committee states that there is "no indication that Israel has opened investigations into the actions of those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead". In other words, one of the most serious allegations about the conduct of Israel's military operations remains completely unaddressed".

They also criticized Hamas "We regret that no domestic investigations at all have been started into any of the allegations of international crimes committed by members of Palestinian armed groups in Gaza which have fired thousands of rockets into southern Israel. The committee observes the same in its report".

Their statement concluded with "We consider that calls to reconsider or even retract the report, as well as attempts at misrepresenting its nature and purpose, disregard the right of victims, Palestinian and Israeli, to truth and justice. They also ignore the responsibility of the relevant parties under international law to conduct prompt, thorough, effective and independent investigations. We regret the personal attacks and the extraordinary pressure placed on members of the fact-finding mission since we began our work in May 2009. This campaign has been clearly aimed at undermining the integrity of the report and its authors. Had we given in to pressures from any quarter to sanitise our conclusions, we would be doing a serious injustice to the hundreds of innocent civilians killed during the Gaza conflict, the thousands injured, and the hundreds of thousands whose lives continue to be deeply affected by the conflict and the blockade.

The report has triggered a process that is still under way and should continue until justice is done and respect for international human rights and humanitarian law by everyone is ensured".

External links

Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 25 September 2009.
Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Initial Response to Report of the Fact Finding Mission on Gaza, 24 September 2009.
Halevi, Jonathan D. Blocking the Truth of the Gaza War, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs is a public policy think tank devoted to research and analysis of critical issues facing the Middle East. The center is located in Jerusalem, Israel...

, Vol. 9, No. 10, 18 September 2009.
Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center: The Asymmetric War in the Gaza Strip, March 2010.
Barenblat, Rachel. The Goldstone report: A Jewish view, Al Jazeera English
Al Jazeera report on the UN Fact Finding Mission and reactions to it – video on YouTube
20 min Interview with Richard Goldstone on Al-Jazeera (part 1, part 2)
PBS
Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

: Interview with Richard Goldstone
Amb. Dore Gold's exchange with Justice Richard Goldstone at Brandeis University, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs is a public policy think tank devoted to research and analysis of critical issues facing the Middle East. The center is located in Jerusalem, Israel...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Mandate of mission

Mission members

Investigation

Report

Blockade of Gaza allegations

Civilian targeting allegations

Al-Maqadmah mosque incident

Zeitoun incident

Al-Fakhura school incident

Abd Rabbo family incident

White phosphorus allegations

Human shields allegations

Accusations against Palestinian militants

Israel

Preliminary analysis by Israel

Palestinian National Authority

United Nations

United States

House of Representatives resolution

Europe

Asia and Africa

Organizations

Non-government organizations

Journalism

Military commentators

Legal commentators

Other

Mission members' responses to criticism

Human Rights Council

General Assembly

Security Council

Israeli internal investigations

Hamas claims

UN Panel assessment

Future ramifications

Goldstone's retraction of civilian targeting claim

Goldstone's statement

Reactions

Statement issued by other members of UN mission

See also

External links