Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva will reopen a debate Thursday 15 October on the conduct of both sides in last winter’s brief war in Gaza, Palestine, between Israel and Hamas, the Gaza strip’s political authority. A report by former South African judge Richard Goldstone suggests both armed groups may have committed war crimes. It recommends that they conduct their own impartial investigations within six months or have the case referred to the International Criminal Court. A call by Libya for the UN in New York to take up the report by strongly rebuffed by Israel which said late Wednesday 14 October that as long as the report is “on the table” there can be no peace negotiations with Palestine.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), the nominal representative of the Palestinians, initially asked for the debate on the report to be deferred, but it came under sharp criticism from Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza strip since elections in 2007 forced out Fatah and the PA.

The Israeli government has criticized the report as biased, and individual ministers have attacked Goldstone personally. Goldstone is Jewish and has close personal ties to Israel. When he was initially named by the UN to conduct the investigation into Israeli misconduct, he asked for the investigation to include 8,000 missiles fired by Hamas into Israeli territory, says Antonio Cassese, writing in the Financial Times 14 October. The report concludes that this may be a war crime. It also says that Israel acted disproportionately, in an attack “designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize” civilians.

The FT published a lengthy commentary by Cassese, president of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, and a former colleague of Goldstone, “We must stand behind the UN report on Gaza.” He calls on Western governments to apply the same standards of warfare accountability to both sides in the Palestinian conflict that they do in other conflicts such as Congo, Darfur and Kenya. “With a Nobel Peace Prize laureate at its helm, the US government can show that it applies international law equally around the world, whether it affects friend or foe,” he notes.

The US at the end of September responded to the report by saying that while it wants to participate in discussions about it, the report has several serious flaws. It recommended that the Human Rights Council pass a consensus resolution to encourage Israel to use its own legal system to review possible war crimes and to call upon Hamas to stop clearly illegal activities.

Links to other sites: Al_Jazeera, Financial Times, US Mission in Geneva, Posner response to report, Wall Street Journal

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