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The government and some media in Israel are rejecting out of hand a report publishd 15 September by the United Nations Fact Finding Commission on the Gaza Conflict from end-2008 to mid-January 2009, whose investigations were led by South African judge Richard Goldstone. The commission writes that acts which can be considered war crimes have been carried out by both Israelis and the Palestinians, but “although the UN investigation found that Palestinian militants also committed war crimes, the overwhelming majority of the criticism in a summary of the 574-page report targets Israel”, reports CNN. Israel did not cooperate in preparing the report.

The Israeli government promptly fought back, saying that the report had been prejudiced from the start because it does not take into consideration the missiles rained on Israeli civilians by Palestinians. The Jerusalem Post today 16 September carries an interview with Goldstone’s daughter, who lives in Toronto, Canada and who lived in Israel for six months.”“I am not angry with him, I love him and respect him,” the J-post reports her saying. “He is a Zionist. My dad loves Israel and it wasn’t easy for him to see and hear what happened. I think he heard and saw things he didn’t expect to see and hear, and I am one-hundred-percent sure he did it [conducted the investigation] in the hope that the Israelis would come to cooperate, and he wanted to help find a long-term solution for the state of Israel.”

The J-Post also quotes Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gabriela Shalev, as saying that the report will hamper Middle East peace efforts. Arutz Sheva reports that Israelis the world over are strongly behind the government in rejecting the report and that “Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon (Yisrael Beiteinu) said Wednesday morning that Israel will work with the United States, which, along with other Western countries, has a vested interest in not allowing the UN to impose international law on democracies,” It notes that Ayalon is meeting today in Washington, DC with Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN.