Abraham Rabinovich
May 07
ISRAELI officials lashed out yesterday at a UN report accusing the Jewish state of "negligence or recklessness" in attacks on UN facilities in the Gaza Strip during its war with Hamas in January.
"The spirit of the report and its language are tendentious and entirely unbalanced," the Israeli Foreign Ministry said.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who reportedly accused Israel of lying about the damage it caused to UN facilities in the three-week conflict, nevertheless rejected the report's call for a full and impartial investigation into the war.
He tempered the report's findings by telling a press conference that Israeli communities near the Gaza Strip "faced and continue to face indiscriminate rocket attacks by Hamas and other militant groups".
The five-man inquiry commission was led by Ian Martin, a Briton who is a former head of Amnesty International. Its brief was to investigate casualties or damage involving UN facilities in Gaza but its conclusions touch on broader humanitarian issues regarding Israel's use of massive firepower in the densely populated strip.
Mr Ban refused to publish the complete 184-page report but released his own summary of it.
The report accused Israel of "varying degrees of negligence or recklessness" towards UN facilities in its Gaza operation and said the deaths of civilians should be investigated under international humanitarian law.
At his press conference, Mr Ban said there would be no further investigations.
The report's demand for financial compensation for damage to UN facilities could amount to $11million, Israeli officials said.
The Palestinians place their death toll in the war at 1400 and say the bulk were civilians. Israel says about 1200 Palestinians were killed and that more than 700 were fighters. Ten Israeli soldiers were killed in the operation.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said the report ignored the fact that Hamas and other militants had fired about 4000 rockets and mortar shells at Israel. "After eight years, we said 'enough'. We have the most moral army in the world. Responsibility lies solely with Hamas."
A central issue in the UN inquiry was a much-publicised incident at the Jabaliya refugee camp, where more than 40 civilians were reported killed inside a UN school compound by Israeli mortar fire, according to the Palestinians.
UN officials in the area initially lent credence to the report. In response, Israeli officials said the army was responding to Hamas mortar fire from the compound.
It eventually emerged that no Hamas fire had come from the compound and that no Israeli shells had hit the compound.
Instead, Palestinian mortarmen several hundred metres from the compound had fired at Israeli positions and Israeli counter-fire had hit the Palestinian position.
An Israeli investigation determined that three civilians and nine militants had been killed in the exchange.
The first of the commission's 11 recommendations was that the UN seek "formal acknowledgment by the Government of Israel that its public statements alleging Palestinians fired" from within the UN school compound "were untrue and regretted".
The report, however, apparently made no mention of the initial claims that Israeli shells had hit the school, causing more than 40 civilian casualties - a claim supported at the time by a UN agency - which were also untrue.
The UN report cited an air attack that hit the compound of the Asma elementary school in Gaza City, where hundreds of Palestinians were sheltering.
Three young men were killed in the compound. The report said they were going to the toilet and not engaging in military activity.
Also cited were the killing of two children by shell fragments inside the UN school at Bait Lahiya and damage caused to the UN's main headquarters by Israeli shells.
Israeli officials termed Mr Ban's summary "objective", but expressed fears that other UN officials would use the report to smear Israel.
"When we saw the summary of the report, we were appalled," said an Israeli official to the news agency YNet. "It was written as if they didn't listen, didn't understand, maybe didn't want to understand."
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