THE DISMISSIVE responses of both Israel and Hamas to the report of the UN Human Rights Council investigation into the Gaza invasion in January were both depressingly predictable and remarkably similar.
Both sought to justify their actions on the basis of their “right to self-defence” and studiously avoided answering the detailed and exhaustively documented claims of the report. Israel went on to attack the credibility of the inquiry team, its mandate, members and methodology.
The 575-page report, the most authoritative yet on the Gaza events, found both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. It finds that Israel’s incursion was a “deliberate, disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population”. It says, inter alia, that Israeli forces committed “grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention”, that its troops used Palestinian civilians as human shields, and repeatedly failed in their obligation to civilians. It condemns the economic blockade and shelling of Gazan infrastructure as illegal “collective punishment” of the territory’s people.
Hamas is accused of war crimes in its indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel, also for failing to protect civilians, and for its extrajudicial executions, arrests and ill-treatment of political opponents. The report calls for the immediate release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held captive by the group for three years in Gaza. The committee was led by respected former judge of South Africa’s constitutional court and former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal of Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, Richard Goldstone. Among its members was Col Desmond Travers, formerly of the Irish Defence Forces, although Ireland itself was party to an abstention by EU member states on the establishment of the inquiry over concerns, shared with the US and some other states, about the political impartiality of its mandate.
Nevertheless, Goldstone, who only agreed to chair the inquiry if it was also allowed to look at Palestinian actions, is persuasive that both Israel and Hamas have serious cases to answer in international law, should be held to account, and that both have obligations to carry out credible impartial investigations into the actions of their forces. In the absence of such inquiries, which the Israelis yesterday ruled out, the UN Security Council, he argues, should itself carry out such inquiries with a view to potential charges before the International Criminal Court.