“I deny that completely,” Judge Richard Goldstone said… “I was completely independent, nobody dictated any outcome, and the outcome was a result of the independent inquiries that our mission made,” he said. Read more »
Netanyahu’s message is that the Goldstone Commission report hinders the United States’ war on terror. The Foreign Ministry decided Wednesday to focus their efforts to combat the report’s accusations on the United States, Russia and a few other members of the United Nations Security Council and the Human Rights Council that are involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
IOA Editor: The Israeli propaganda machine is going full blast. To protect democracy from terrorism, the UN report deserves every possible rejection, naturally.
See also Norman Finkelstein’s interview and Gideon Levy’s commentary on the UN report. Read more »
There’s a name on every bullet, and there’s someone responsible for every crime. The Teflon cloak Israel has wrapped around itself since Operation Cast Lead has been ripped off, once and for all, and now the difficult questions must be faced. It has become superfluous to ask whether war crimes were committed in Gaza, because authoritative and clear-cut answers have already been given. So the follow-up question has to be addressed: Who’s to blame? If war crimes were committed in Gaza, it follows that there are war criminals at large among us. They must be held accountable and punished. This is the harsh conclusion to be drawn from the detailed United Nations report.
IOA Editor: The time to “avert disgrace” was a year ago, before launching the Gaza attack. The Hague is the proper place for states that behave criminally – deservedly, to use Levy’s own language. Read more »
There is only thing worse than denial – the admission that the IDF indeed acted as has been described, but that these actions are both normal and appropriate. Read more »
The main limitation of the report is it’s all cast in the language of violations of the laws of war. And the fundamental fact about what happened in Gaza is it wasn’t a war. There was no war in Gaza. That’s the main misunderstanding about what happened there. Read more »
Had Richard Goldstone not served as the head of the UN inquiry into the Gaza war, the accusations against Israel would have been harsher, Goldstone’s daughter, Nicole, said in an interview conducted in Hebrew with Army Radio on Wednesday. Read more »
Israel “punished and terrorised” civilians in Gaza in a disproportionate attack in its three-week war on the territory earlier this year, a United Nations report has found. Judge Richard Goldstone, who led the inquiry, said he found evidence Israel targeted civilians and used excessive force in the assault, which was launched on December 27. “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. More than 1,400 Palestinians – about a third of them women and children – were killed in the war. Thirteen Israelis died. Read more »
Israel’s three-week war in Gaza brought a wave of international criticism. About 1,400 people died and accusations of possible war crimes have been levelled against both the Israeli military and the Palestinian militant groups in Gaza, notably Hamas. The latest and most prominent inquiry, led by Richard Goldstone, a respected South African judge, was conducted for the UN human rights council.
Read UN report and access many information resources via The Guardian’s article. Read more »
From the most senior military judge down to the lowest private at a checkpoint, hundreds of thousands of perfectly normal Israelis who are not violent at home are partners in the mission of administering, demarcating, restricting and taming the other society while cumulatively damaging its rights, welfare and well-being. This is the norm that is not taken into account here in the statistics on violence and the violent. Read more »
A Military Police investigation into a soldier’s killing of a Palestinian near Hebron in January has been going on for seven and a half months, and there is still no end in sight. Yet the sector commander has been giving briefings for the past few months based on his own inquiry into the incident, which he describes as “a serious failure in moral and professional terms.” Read more »
