The UN report on Israel and Gaza

Israel in the dock


A report by a UN body controversially chastises Israel’s government and its army for their actions during the war in Gaza earlier this year

AP
EVER since Israel’s intense, three-week war in Gaza ended in January, its politicians and soldiers have been carpet-bombed by critical reports, both foreign and Israeli. These have taken aim at the conduct of the operation, some of the weapons used, many of the targets chosen, and the behaviour of some members of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). For a country that prides itself on having “the most moral army in the world”, the accusations, though mostly rejected, have stung.

But even the most battle-hardened officials were shocked, then furious, at the litany of accusations in a 575-page report published this week by a fact-finding mission headed by Richard Goldstone, an eminent jurist. The incendiary premise of his report, to be delivered to the UN’s 47-country Human Rights Council in Geneva this month, is that Israel is guilty of one of the worst crimes: deliberately and systematically attacking civilians and making them suffer as a war aim. The Israelis knew they would get pasted, as the council is a serial Israel-bashing outfit that often lets more egregious human-rights abusers around the world off the hook. But the report was even more critical than they had feared.

Just as damning in Israel’s eyes is its claim to find little or no evidence that Hamas, an Islamist Palestinian group that controls the densely populated Gaza Strip while refusing to recognise Israel, deliberately fired rockets from civilian houses, stored weapons in mosques and used the basement of one of Gaza’s main hospitals as a military command centre. If Hamas did such things, says Mr Goldstone, they might be judged war crimes too.

The report claims that Israel specifically sought to punish Gaza’s civilians because many of them back Hamas, which won a general election in 2006 in the Palestinian territories, including the separate but bigger West Bank. A year later, in Gaza, Hamas violently ousted Fatah, its secular rival that had long ruled the Palestinian roost.

Israel, which refused to co-operate with the UN mission, flatly denies it sought to hammer civilians. Its aim, it says, was to stop Hamas firing rockets, with increasing range, at towns in southern Israel. Since late 2004, they had killed 16 Israeli civilians and injured many more, terrified thousands of them, and disrupted the economy. Mr Goldstone’s report criticised the indiscriminate firing of rockets as potential war crimes, but concentrated overwhelmingly on Israel’s shortcomings. President Shimon Peres remarked that the authors “would not have written those things if their children lived in Sderot [a southern Israeli town close to Gaza], under the threat of constant rocket attacks”.

The number of civilian deaths in the Gaza war is disputed. B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights monitor, puts the figure at more than 770; the Israeli government says much fewer. Various international outfits put the overall death toll at more than 1,400; the Israeli government says 1,166.

In any event, an interim report issued by Israel’s government in July listed measures it said it had taken to keep the civilian toll as low as possible. It had aborted air strikes when the risk to civilians was too great, dropped warning leaflets and made telephone calls to Gazans, and declared daily humanitarian pauses in the fighting.

Indeed, the Israelis point out that even as fighting raged, some Palestinians were able to complain about humanitarian issues directly to Israel’s Supreme Court for immediate ruling. Legal advisers, involved in planning the operation from the start, were deployed during the fighting round the clock. Israel offers this as evidence of good-faith efforts to minimise civilian harm. The Goldstone report cites it as evidence of crimes deliberately committed.

The report accused the IDF, among other things, of recklessly using white phosphorus and of attacking police stations, civilian ministries, food-producing factories, sewage plants and electricity stations. The Israelis retort that white phosphorus is legally used by many armies as a smokescreen provided it is not fired over densely populated areas. And it says that Hamas, a terrorist movement, makes little distinction between security and civilian matters. The Israelis’ own report acknowledges mistakes made by all armies in the fog of war: some wrong buildings hit, cases of misidentification of civilians as fighters.

Few if any conflicts have been subject to this level of forensic investigation. Some allegations of wrongdoing by individual soldiers have been raised by lobbies such Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, and Breaking the Silence, an Israeli outfit set up by former soldiers to educate the public in the grim realities of occupation on the West Bank. Official Israeli investigators are looking into upwards of 100 Gaza-related complaints; 23 criminal investigations have been opened so far.

Mr Goldstone’s daughter, Nicole, who lived in Israel for many years but now lives in Canada, vigorously defended her father’s report in an interview on the army radio. “If it hadn’t been for him, the report would have been even harsher,” she said, speaking in Hebrew. But for Mr Peres the Goldstone report makes “a mockery of history, by not distinguishing between the aggressor and the defender…Any other country would have done the same.”