JERUSALEM – Israel has called on the UN to cancel a report that said it had committed war crimes during its December 2008-January 2009 Gaza offensive, after its author said he might have been wrong.
South African jurist Richard Goldstone chaired a fact-finding mission, which, in a 2009 report to the UN Human Rights Council, said both Israel and the Islamist group Hamas, which controls Gaza, were guilty of war crimes in the conflict.
But Mr Goldstone wrote in a Washington Post column published on Friday: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a different document.”
About 1,400 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, and 13 Israelis were killed in the Gaza offensive.
Mr Goldstone indicated in his article that had Israel co-operated with him at the time of his investigation, it could have shown civilians were not deliberately targeted “as a matter of policy”.
“I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes,” Mr Goldstone said. – (Reuters)