Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the report “biased”, adding that the U.N. “condemns Israel more than Iran, Syria, and North Korea combined”.
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The report, released today, found “substantial information pointing to the possible commission of war crimes by both Israel and Palestinian armed groups”.
The report notes that during the 51-day war, 6,000 airstrikes and approximately 50,000 tank and artillery shells were fired by Israel into Gaza, killing 1,462 Palestinian civilians, one third of them children.
Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said that its rockets and mortars were aimed at Israeli military sites, not at civilians.
“The fact that Israel didn’t revise its practice of air-strikes, even after their dire effects on civilians became apparent, raises questions of whether this was part of a broader policy which was at least tacitly approved at the highest level of government”, the commission said in a statement. The panel said the indiscriminate firing of missiles into Israel by Palestinian armed groups in the Hamas-ruled territory may constitute a war crime.
In an official statement issued by Hamas, the organization said that “This clear condemnation of Israel obligates bringing its leaders to the global Criminal Court and other global courts and put them on trial for the crimes they committed against our people”. “You will see that we don’t talk in the report about evidence, what we have collected instead in a scrupulously objective fashion, are witness accounts, submissions and other material that could point the way to a more thorough investigation into what happened in the summer of 2014 in Gaza, the West Bank including East Jerusalem and in Israel, in order to determine whether conduct by either side violated the laws of war”, Davis told a news conference in Geneva.The commission of inquiry was launched a year ago at the request of the Palestinians. The execution without trial of alleged Palestinian collaborators with Israel amounts to a war crime, it said.
Israel, which has been harshly critical of the commission since its inception past year, blasted the report as biased.
William Schabas, who initially headed the United Nations inquiry, quit in February over Israeli accusations of bias due to consultancy work he had done for the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
‘Israel does not commit war crimes’.
The report said that while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it took extensive measures to avoid civilian casualties, it “may not have done everything feasible to avoid or limit” these.
“It is well known that the entire process that led to the production of this report was politically motivated and morally flawed from the outset”. On the Israeli side, 67 soldiers were killed along with six civilians, it noted.
Palestinian militants had used unguided rockets to sow fear and terror among Israelis, also in violation of humanitarian law, the report said.
The report also highlighted that hundreds of people were killed and thousands of homes were destroyed or damaged during the Israeli ground offensive into Gaza that began in mid-July 2014.
It said the United Nations report had “problematic origins” as its authors lacked experience of worldwide humanitarian law.
The report accused Hamas of launching rockets from densely populated areas of Gaza, putting Palestinian civilians at risk.
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In this regard, the commission says the impact of the 2014 attacks “cannot be assessed separately from the blockade”.
