Madam, – Recent attempts by the Israeli government to persuade the UN to retract the findings of its fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict headed by Richard Goldstone are a cynical attempt to avoid accountability for war crimes.
Some of the politicians calling most loudly for it to be withdrawn were themselves implicated in decisions taken by the Israeli cabinet during the conflict.
Amnesty International’s own report, independent of the UN mission and based on evidence collected by our researchers in Gaza, found substantial evidence of war crimes by the Israeli defence forces. These included deliberate attacks on civilians, the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields and intentional targeting of emergency medical staff.
The UN report, which investigated allegations against both the Israeli defence forces and Hamas, examined 11 incidents where Israeli forces launched direct, fatal, attacks against civilians and defined them as war crimes. Mr Goldstone mentioned only one of these in his recent Washington Post article (Opinion, April 9th), which the Israeli ambassador has chosen to interpret as a complete U-turn (Opinion, April 12th).
It should also be pointed out that the other three members of the UN mission have not changed their position and that Israel refused to cooperate with the mission. Amnesty International has been monitoring the Israeli military investigations and recently issued an updated assessment concluding that Israel has failed to meet its obligation to conduct credible, independent investigations in line with international law.
There is overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces committed war crimes during Operation Cast Lead, as did Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in their deliberate attacks on civilians in southern Israel.
Rather than continuing to duck responsibility, or blame some imaginary conspiracy against Israel, the Israeli ambassador would do better to encourage his government to co-operate with the UN and deliver justice for the hundreds of Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – The Israeli ambassador (April 12th) will have an extremely long wait indeed – until the rockets cease firing: in other words, never – if he expects any apology following Richard Goldstone’s retraction of the original conclusion, that there was an Israeli policy of deliberately targeting civilians. For it is a lamentable fact that those who seek to demonise, delegitimise, slander and libel Israel have no real interest in evaluating rationally any new evidence, even when it has been so publicly presented by Mr Goldstone himself.
This is the case for a very simple reason: the sole agenda of Israel’s demonisers is to see the end of Israel, simply because it dares to exist at all. – Yours, etc,