A UN team investigating possible war crimes in Gaza, led by Richard Goldstone, has arrived in the Strip on a week-long fact finding mission.
The four-member team entered from Egypt after Israel failed to grant visas, despite repeated requests by the UN.
The UN wants to investigate whether Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during Israel’s three-week operation in Gaza in December and January.
Israel accuses the UN branch carrying out the mission of bias against it.
The UN Human Rights Council has been accused of singling out Israel unfairly, and is viewed by some as having less credibility than other parts of the United Nations.
But correspondents say the selection of Mr Goldstone, a respected South African war crimes prosecutor who is also Jewish, as head of the inquiry has given it greater clout.
“They have been instructed to prove that Israel is guilty and we will not collaborate with such a masquerade,” foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told AP news agency.
Public hearings
The team plans to meet “all concerned parties”, including non-governmental organisations, UN agencies and victims and witnesses of alleged violations of international humanitarian law, its office said in a statement.
Mr Goldstone has previously said his team had hoped to visit southern Israeli towns which have suffered Palestinian rocket fire , before entering Gaza from Israel, but Israel has shown no sign of allowing access.
Israel was initially angered that the team was tasked only with investigating alleged Israeli violations, but after Mr Goldstone was appointed, its mandate was widened to cover the activities of Palestinian militants too.
Inquiry conclusions
Several investigations into alleged violations of international law during Israel’s 22-day operation in Gaza, which ended on 18 January, have now reported back.
Israeli bombardment of Gaza, 14 January 2009
Israel has been accused of war crimes for air raids in heavily populated areas
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has requested more than $11m (£7m) compensation from Israel for damage to UN property in Gaza, after a limited UN inquiry accused Israel of targeting known civilian shelters and providing untrue statements to justify actions in which civilians were killed.
The report found Israel to blame in six out of nine incidents when death or injury were caused to people sheltering at UN property and UN buildings were damaged.
The Israeli military has concluded in an internal investigation that its troops fought lawfully, although errors did take place, such as the deaths of 21 people in a wrongly targeted house.
Meanwhile, a fact-finding team commissioned by the Arab League said there was sufficient evidence for the Israeli military to be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and that “the Israeli political leadership was also responsible for such crimes”.
It also said Palestinian militants were guilty of war crimes in their use of indiscriminate attacks on civilians.
Palestinian rights groups say more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed during the January conflict. Israel puts the figure at 1,166.
Israeli and Palestinian estimates also differ on the numbers of civilian casualties.
Ten Israeli soldiers were killed, including four by friendly fire, and three Israel civilians died in rocket attacks by Palestinian militants.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said little had been done in the past nine months to ease movement and access for the Palestinians in the West Bank.
According to a closure survey it completed in March 2009 and released on Tuesday, there are 634 obstacles blocking internal Palestinian movement and access in the West Bank.
This is an increase of four obstacles compared with the last report in September 2008. The obstacles include 93 staffed checkpoints and 541 unstaffed obstacles such as roadblocks, earth mounds, earth walls, road barriers, and trenches. Of the 93 checkpoints, 20 so called “partial checkpoints” are only staffed part of the time, including some which are rarely staffed.
A U.N. human rights expert says he will proceed with a mission to the Gaza Strip to investigate possible war crimes during the recent Israel-Hamas conflict despite Israeli objections.
The U.N.’s Richard Goldstone says Israel has not responded to his request to enter the country and cross into Gaza for his investigation of Israel’s offensive against Hamas rulers.
Speaking in Geneva Wednesday, he said his four-member team hopes to visit the southern Israeli town of Sderot, before crossing into Gaza. But, he says the team will enter Gaza through Egypt if necessary.
Israel objects to the mission because, in its view, it is based on a biased mandate.
The 47-nation U.N. Human Rights Council initially instructed the investigators to examine accusations of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. It later broadened the mission’s scope to look at the actions of both sides in the war.
Goldstone says he also has decided to hold public hearings in which witnesses will testify about the conflict. He says the hearings will be held in Geneva if it is not possible to locate them in the region.
It will be the first time a U.N. human rights investigation conducts such public hearings. The hearings will be modeled on inquiries Goldstone conducted in post-apartheid South Africa, where he served as a judge.
Goldstone, who is from South Africa, says his team must submit its report by August 4. The other investigators include British law professor Christine Chinkin, retired Irish army colonel Desmond Travers and Pakistani human rights advocate Hina Jilani.
The U.N. team also plans to visit the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Israel says it launched the Gaza offensive in December, 2008 to stop cross-border rocket attacks by Palestinian militants. The fighting killed at least 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. Before it ended in January it also had destroyed thousands of homes in Gaza and damaged its infrastructure.
Palestinians and international rights groups accuse Israel of war crimes. Israel blames Hamas for the heavy casualties, accusing the militants of using schools, mosques and residential areas for cover.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at a press conference in Gaza City outside the UN headquarters, still smoldering from the Israeli bombardment of the facility, 20 January 2009. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)
Late last week, according to the BBC Arabic news website, a report was submitted to the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon about the scale of destruction Israel inflicted on UN installations in Gaza. This was also mentioned on a BBC news bulletin on 1 May, but I could find little trace of this story anywhere else.
The brief news item stated that the UN report contained secret information supplied by Israel about an incident in which more than 40 Palestinian civilians were massacred when Israeli shells fell “outside” a UN school where many Palestinians were taking shelter. The secretary-general is reportedly considering how much of the information he can release without revealing the information supplied by Israel, the news item said, adding that the UN report concluded that Hamas fighters were not inside UN buildings but close to them.
Commenting on the report, the BBC said that it was informed by a diplomatic source, that the United States has informed Ban’s office that the report should not be published in full due to the damage that that could cause to the Middle East peace talks; in other words (mine, in fact) to Israel.
The point here is neither to pass any premature judgment on an unpublished report — despite obvious inconsistencies regarding shelling “outside” a UN installation that was somehow severely damaged — nor to predict how much of the report the secretary-general will finally decide to publish.
(As this article was being prepared for publication, details about the UN inquiry team report were published. The inquiry, led by Ian Martin, former director of Amnesty International, accused Israel of failing to protect UN facilities and civilians, dismissed as “untrue” Israeli claims that Hamas fighters had been firing from UN facilities, held Israel responsible for all deaths and injuries in six out of nine incidents, and called for further investigation into possible war crimes. Ban has rejected calls to pursue the probe, but called on Israel to pay $11 million in reparations for the damage it caused to the UN.)
But nor can we forget the dark days just past when Israel was slaughtering the innocent people of Gaza and the world stood by, even blaming Hamas — which had scrupulously observed a negotiated ceasefire until Israel broke it — for bringing on the apocalypse.
As the dust from the Israeli bombing began to settle, Ban decided to visit Gaza. That raised hopes that the UN was finally determined to act with courage and responsibility. Gaza had been off limits to international figures because supposedly a politically contagious terrorist organization had taken control of the place and no one was supposed to risk contact with it, even if compelling humanitarian considerations required that.
Well, the secretary-general decided on 20 January to defy the norm and go to Gaza. But his courage only went so far. His highly-protected convoy took him straight to the still smoldering compound of the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) whose warehouses of food and fuel were destroyed by Israeli attacks along with their contents. He must have noted that the massive destruction could not have resulted from “shelling outside” the installation. “I am just appalled,” he said, “Everyone is smelling this bombing still. It is still burning. It is an outrageous and totally unacceptable attack against the United Nations.” This flash of anger was limited however only to UN facilities. He spoke as if the rest of Gaza — where more than 7,000 people lay dead or injured, and thousands of homes, schools, mosques, universities, police stations and government buildings were destroyed — did not exist, or were not of UN concern.
Whisked around in his convoy, he did not bother to stop and talk to any of Israel’s victims — the families who had just dug the remains of their loved ones from the rubble or those with horrific injuries in Gaza’s overstretched hospitals. These are the very people, the Palestinian refugees, that the UN is in Gaza to help, but there was it seems no time for them.
Ban did say, however, that he had “condemned from the outbreak of this conflict the excessive use of force by the Israeli forces in Gaza,” and added “I view the rocket attacks into Israel as completely unacceptable.” He also said that he would dispatch a humanitarian needs assessment team led by the UN special coordinator.
What he was saying in effect is that he found Israel’s attack on Gaza perfectly acceptable, but he disagreed only with the tonnage of high explosives that should be dropped by Israeli planes. Indeed, he should specify exactly how many dead children, how many demolished houses, how many burn victims, how many destroyed mosques he would tolerate as not being “excessive.” Would half the number killed and half the damage inflicted be reasonably non-excessive, or perhaps one-third? It would be helpful for both sides to know so that the Israelis would limit their killing to the UN-specified quota, and the Gazans would know how many of their community to sacrifice for the sacred UN-sanctioned killing.
For Ban, then, Israeli bombing is good — although he would like perhaps to see a little bit less. But, in tune with his political masters, he considers Palestinians to have no right to any form of self-defense against the Israeli occupation, constant aggression and the Israeli, internationally-supported, deadly siege, with whatever means they have at their disposal.
In order to maintain the false sense of balance between aggressor and victim, Ban had to visit the Israeli settlement of Sderot. When he patiently inspected the scars left by Hamas rockets that killed a total of three Israelis, he stated, “the projectiles are indiscriminate weapons, and Hamas attacks are violations of basic humanitarian law.” This is the same Ban who did not once invoke the law with respect to Israel’s ongoing massive violations.
It’s also notable that the rockets fired by Palestinian resistance factions are not so much “indiscriminate” as unguided. There’s no reason to believe that if Palestinians had access to the American-supplied guidance systems Israel has that they would not target Israeli military bases (indeed they tried to do that although Israeli military censorship did not allow reporting of hits on its military installations). Israel’s bombing on the other hand, and as Ban did not note, is very discriminate — deliberately targeting civilian homes and facilities.
In Sderot, Ban also urged Israel to end its crippling blockade on Gaza, but not because the blockade is a flagrant violation of international law, the Geneva conventions, inhuman and wrong. He worried only that the blockade would strengthen Hamas; otherwise, like a measured dose of bombing, it would be perfectly fine.
Ban ought to have inspected the destruction in Gaza, and visited and spent time with Israel’s Palestinian victims before setting foot in any UN installation. But it seems he actually avoided that on purpose to send a signal that he was not showing sympathy to “terrorists” or the people accused of harboring them, in order to inoculate himself from criticism by Israel and its chorus of apologists. He certainly saw the example of the UN special rapporteur for human rights, Princeton professor emeritus and international law expert Richard Falk, who was expelled and vilified by Israel and the US administration for faithfully and truthfully carrying out his mandate.
This is but one of the many sad stories of how the UN top leadership has betrayed and failed its mission. The UN does not exist only to protect its personnel and installations. The UN flag alone ought to provide that kind of real protection — immunity which no state dares to violate without fear of the consequences. But Israel has repeatedly attacked UN facilities, schools, peacekeeping forces and personnel in Palestine and Lebanon knowing full well that it, not the UN, enjoys immunity for its actions. The next time Israel attacks a UN facility, part of the responsibility will lie with those who failed to act correctly this time around.
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times and is republished with the author’s permission.
A United Nations demand for financial compensation for Israeli strikes on UN facilities in Gaza could come to $11 million, a government official in Jerusalem said Tuesday in response to a UN report that criticized Israel for the attacks. The incidents occurred during Operation Cast Lead in January.
The official said Israel would begin negotiations with the UN on this and other matters in the coming weeks.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon accused Israel Tuesday of lying about attacks on the facilities, including one said to have killed more than 40 people outside a school compound, and formally demanded compensation. He said a UN investigation found conclusively that Israel was responsible for attacks on several schools, a health clinic and the organization’s Gaza headquarters. Some of the weapons used in these attacks contained white phosphorous, he added.
The report, which was presented to the Security Council Tuesday, accuses Israel of intentionally firing on the UN institutions and using excessive force.
Israel denies that it intentionally struck the compounds. It also says it was forced to act against militants using these buildings and other civilian facilities for cover. Witnesses said at the time that militants fired from the area near the school that was hit.
“The spirit of the report and its language are tendentious and entirely unbalanced and ignore the facts as they were presented to the commission,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “The commission prefers the positions of Hamas, a murderous terror organization, and by doing so misleads the world public.”
The Yedioth Ahronoth daily reported that Israel had waged an intensive campaign to keep the report from coming out.
Ban commended Israel for its cooperation and said there would be no further reports on the matter. He also noted in a letter attached to the report, at the Foreign Ministry’s request, that the five-member panel that conducted the investigation cannot make legal findings or consider questions of legal liability, and pointed out that Israeli citizens in the south faced and continue to face indiscriminate rocket attacks by Hamas and other groups.
However, the report itself did not discuss rocket fire or attacks on Israeli civilians. Israeli officials said it also failed to address the intelligence information Israel gave the committee, which they said showed that Hamas was using UN facilities as a base for terror operations.
Israel Defense Forces officials, who called the report biased, said it was too early to tell what its long-term impact would be.
