JERUSALEM — Israeli officials on Wednesday bluntly dismissed one of the main recommendations of the United Nations fact-finding mission’s report on the three-week war in Gaza last winter: a call for the Israeli government to begin an independent investigation of “serious violations” of international humanitarian and human rights law, including evidence of war crimes, during the military campaign.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that the internal military investigations into the Israeli Army’s conduct in Gaza already under way were “a thousand times more serious” than the investigation just completed by the United Nations mission led by Richard Goldstone, a respected South African judge.
Reflecting a broad consensus in Israel, the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, also harshly criticized the report, calling it “a mockery of history” for failing “to distinguish between the aggressor and a state exercising its right for self-defense.” Mr. Peres, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, added that the report “legitimizes terrorist activity, the pursuit of murder and death.”
The report, released on Tuesday, says that if no appropriate independent inquiry gets under way in Israel within six months, the United Nations Security Council should refer the matter to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. It made a similar recommendation for Palestinian authorities, calling for an inquiry into evidence of war crimes committed by Palestinian armed groups firing rockets into Israel.
Ahmed Yousef, a senior adviser to the Hamas government in Gaza, said the local authorities would investigate the relevant cases in the report. But he reiterated his government’s position that Israeli civilians killed by rockets were victims of the fact that the Palestinians had only “primitive weapons, and with such weapons, mistakes are to be expected.” The rockets, he added, were fired in self-defense.
Israeli officials were particularly incensed about what they called the report’s delicate treatment of Hamas. Israel mounted its military offensive in self-defense and as a last resort, they said, to curb the rocket fire from Gaza against southern Israel. In a statement late Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry said the report “effectively ignores Israel’s right of self-defense, makes unsubstantiated claims about its intent and challenges Israel’s democratic values and rule of law.”
“At the same time,” it said, “the report all but ignores the deliberate strategy of Hamas of operating within and behind the civilian population and turning densely populated areas into an arena of battle.”
The report addressed the Israeli allegations, but said it found limited evidence that Palestinian fighters had deliberately used civilians as human shields.
Mr. Regev, the Israeli government spokesman, said he found the whole equation between Israel and Hamas in the United Nations report’s recommendations “bordering on the bizarre.”
Among the Israeli public, the report elicited, for the most part, a furious reaction. Most Israelis strongly supported the offensive in Gaza as the only way to stop the rocket fire. The international condemnation did little to crack that unity, nor have the highly critical reports issued since the war by international organizations and human rights groups. Instead, the reports have prompted a sense that Israel’s very legitimacy is under attack.
The Goldstone report fell into the same pattern. Some Israelis said they were shocked by the breadth of topics it addressed — its description of life in the West Bank and the separation barrier, for example, and Israel’s internal politics — seeing many issues as outside the commission’s mandate. Instead, they said, the report appeared to embrace years of United Nations complaints.
Many Israelis also criticized the report for what they called its failure to understand the difficulties of asymmetrical warfare.
“The whole body of international law is based on army against army,” said Gerald M. Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University and a leading force in Israel against what some here consider the politicized nature of human rights discourse. “What is a civilian? They used to be people who don’t wear uniforms and are outside the military. But if you have Gaza or Southern Lebanese guerrilla forces who don’t wear uniforms, who are illegal combatants, when is it a legitimate target?”
Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Hebrew University who has been highly critical of the Gaza operation, said: “Goldstone should have acknowledged that this asymmetry creates a disadvantage for the state. It places a great strain on our political system. Israel has an extremely difficult time staying democratic in the ruthlessly hostile environment of the Middle East. Comfortable governments in the West cannot begin to understand the plight of a country that went through nine wars.”
During the years when Hamas sent thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians, the United Nations human rights bodies did not put together an investigation or issue a condemnation, Professors Steinberg and Ezrahi, and other experts, said, doing so only after Israel retaliated. In addition, officials here said, Israel’s attack on Gaza was part of its need to deter Iran and its proxies and could not be looked at in isolation.
Amid the furor, some in Israel concurred with the panel’s call for further investigation. A group of nine rights organizations said in a statement that they had written to Israel’s attorney general to demand that he establish an independent body to investigate the military’s activities in Gaza, but that he rejected their request.
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