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Israel has rejected a United Nations report which accused it of committing human rights violations during its three-week war against Hamas in Gaza more than eight months ago. Judge Richard Goldstone, who led the inquiry, said he found evidence that Israel targeted civilians and used excessive force in the assault, which started on December 27, 2008, and killed more than 1,400 Palestinians. But Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli government, said the army did not target civilians during its campaign against Hamas, which governs the Palestinian territory. "Israel did not target civilians. The opposite is true - we made every effort not to see the civilian population caught up in the crossfire," he told Al Jazeera. "Hamas, on the contrary, deliberately embedded itself among the Gaza population, using that population as a human shield," he added. Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, said the report was further evidence that Israel had committed war crimes during its assault on Gaza. He told Al Jazeera that the international community should now launch criminal proceedings against Israeli officials. 'Disproportionate force' Goldstone's report, which comes at the end of a six-month inquiry and will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council later this month, also suggested Palestinian rocket fire into Israel during the war may constitute a crime against humanity.
However, it said Israel used disproportionate force and violated international humanitarian law. The report said Israel deliberately attacked civilians, failed to take precautions to minimise loss of civilian life and cited strong evidence that Israeli forces committed "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. "The mission concluded that actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly in some respects crimes against humanity, were committed by the Israel Defence Force," Goldstone, a former South African justice, said. The investigators recommended that the UN Security Council should call on Israel and the Palestinian authorities to launch their own credible investigations into the conflict within three months. If either side failed to do that, the council should refer the matter to the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor in The Hague within six months, they added. Palestinian violations The report also said there was evidence "that Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes, as well as possibly crimes against humanity", by firing rockets into southern Israel.
"The rocket and mortar attacks have caused terror in the affected communities of southern Israel, causing loss of life and physical and mental injury to civilians, as well as damage to buildings and property," it said. But only four paragraphs of a seven-page summary of the report were devoted to Palestinian violations, and Goldstone's team was more sharply critical of Israel. The report said there were "numerous instances of deliberate attacks on civilians" and civilian objects in Gaza. The firing of white phosphorous shells and the use of high explosive artillery shells were listed as "violations of humanitarian law". Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros, reporting from Gaza, said: "The theme that runs through this new UN report is the idea of excessive force being used [by Israel] and deliberate targeting of civilians. "There was nothing to warn civilians that there were incoming rockets. "The Israelis say they provided leaflets and made thousands of calls to Gazan citizens, but after they called them and dropped leaflets, they didn't give them any option of where to go. "Even the United Nations shelter was hit." Israel cries bias Israel said its military had opened more than 100 inquiries into allegations of alleged wrongdoing by its forces, but had closed most of them because the accusations were found to be baseless. Israel refused to co-operate with the UN investigation, saying the UN Human Rights Council that ordered it was biased against Israel, something Goldstone and the three other members of the team denied. Ismail Haniya, the deposed Palestinian prime minister, said the Hamas government in Gaza facilitated the work of the UN inquiry so that it could uncover the truth behind Israel's actions in Gaza. Goldstone, the former chief prosecutor of the international courts for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, headed the fact-finding mission which conducted dozens of interviews and investigations. About 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed during the war and about 5,500 people were wounded, the overwhelming majority of them in Gaza. | |||||||
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