A Palestinian resistance group says the retraction of the head of a UN fact-finding mission from his report on Israeli war crimes in Gaza is aimed at getting Tel Aviv out of international isolation. On Monday, the Islamic Jihad movement expressed disappointment over the withdrawal of South African judge Richard Goldstone from the findings in his report, Palestinian Ma'an news agency reported.The fact-finding mission, headed by Goldstone, accused Israel of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during its onslaught on Gaza at the turn of 2009.
The mission found evidence that Israel committed “grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of willful killings and willfully causing great suffering to protected persons.”
But in an article published in Washington Post newspaper on Saturday, Goldstone said that he was wrong to say Israel had deliberately targeted civilians during Gaza war that left more than 1,400 Palestinians dead.
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What’s particularly absurd about Goldstone’s op-ed is that his arguments, such as they are, are rebutted by the Goldstone Report itself. Take, for example, this nonsense about Israeli internal inquiries calling the intentionality findings into question. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that these investigations would never have occurred had Israel not been publicly shamed into them by the Goldstone Report, if we turn to the ‘Accountability’ section of the Goldstone Report, we find a detailed discussion of the sort of ‘investigations’ Israel conducts, which discusses in some detail the fact that the IDF’s investigative procedures are specifically intended to improve operational effectiveness and NOT accountability, and that the mechanisms that exist are neither timely, nor transparent, no credible.
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