There was no immediate comment from Hamas, which the report said also may have committed war crimes in firing rockets at Israeli civilian population centers.
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Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said: “The report is biased”. It also includes several USA diplomatic and military leaders, including an ex- ambassador at large for war crimes issues and an ex- senior United States Air Force officer in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last week, Israel released its own report that said the escalation of attacks on Israel by Hamas and other terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip justified its broader military operation under worldwide law. “The commission of inquiry’s mandate presumed Israel guilty from the start”. The report also condemned Hamas for “the extrajudicial executions” of alleged Palestinian “collaborators”.
“The report in hand was commissioned by a notoriously biased institution”. Davis was joined on the commission by Dr. Doudou Diene of Senegal, who formerly served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.
“In some cases, these violations may amount to war crimes”. The U.N. experts assigned to the report said they didn’t receive answers from the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas to its allegations.
He pointed to the chilled relationship between Netanyahu and President Obama over peace talks, settlements and Iran.
The report was presented on Monday in Geneva and urged the worldwide community to actively support the worldwide Criminal Court’s work in the Palestinian Territories. The same month, French President Francois Hollande pledged to seek a resolution on Palestinian statehood at the U.N. Security Council, with terms that Israel opposes.
Many Israeli commentators said the report was less harsh than expected since it included the Israel’s key arguments.
A similar report conducted by the UN’s Human Rights Council following a 2008-2009 war in Gaza was harshly critical of both Israel and Hamas.
Israeli authorities didn’t respond to requests by the commission for information and direct access to Israel, the report says, so the commission had to obtain “harrowing first hand testimony” by video calling and telephone interviews as well as face-to-face interviews with victims and witnesses from the West Bank.
The commission asked Israel to “break with its recent lamentable track record” and hold wrongdoers accountable, but also criticized Palestinian militants for “inherently indiscriminate nature” of rocket and mortar attacks. The increased level of fear among Israeli civilians resulting from the use of tunnels was palpable.
The Israeli report absolved the country’s military forces of violations, saying what happened is the effect of fighting against a group that had taken up positions in crowded urban settings. The report said in many incidents, Israel “may not have done everything feasible to avoid or limit civilian casualties”.
The commission also criticized Israel’s claims that it had done its duty by warning civilians of impending attacks on residential areas in advance, saying that numerous warnings were ineffective, as civilians were often trapped and had nowhere to flee to.
In a report after a year-long inquiry, they called on Israel to explain its “targeting decisions” to allow independent assessment of its attacks on the Gaza Strip, where they said 1,462 civilians were killed and thousands of homes destroyed.
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