Israeli Government and Hamas Reject UN Gaza Report

Both Israeli and Palestinian officials criticized a United Nations Human Rights Council report on last summer’s fighting between Israel and the Islamist Hamas in the Gaza Strip that found that both Israel and Hamas may have committed war crimes. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu labeled it “flawed and biased” and said that “Israel is defending itself and is doing so in accordance with international law.” In Gaza, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said its rockets were aimed at Israeli military sites, not at civilians. Israel did not cooperate with the Human Rights Council, which it sees as biased against Israel, and did not allow them to enter Gaza. The report calls on both sides to “cooperate fully with the preliminary examination of the International Criminal Court and with any subsequent investigation that may be opened.” The 200-page report was published at a news conference in Geneva yesterday. The primary author of the report, former NY Supreme Court Judge Mary McGowan Davis fell short of calling for a war crimes suit against Israel at the International Criminal Court. The report also found that 1462 Palestinian civilians were killed in the fighting, one-third of whom were children. Israel says that most of the dead were fighters, not civilians. Israel’s criticism, while pointed, was not as sharp as its reaction to a previous report on the fighting in Gaza in 2009. At that time Netanyahu called the report a “prize for terrorists” and a “kangaroo court.”