UN Gaza report becomes political football

[IndianaGreen]

UN Gaza report becomes political football

by: Susan Webb
November 4 2009

Predictably, a United Nations report on last winter's Gaza war has become a political football.

Following the war, with reports of well over a thousand civilian deaths, charges that Israel had used deadly white phosphorus in densely populated areas, and Israeli anger over rocket attacks on its civilian population, the UN Human Rights Council set up a fact-finding mission chaired by respected international jurist Richard Goldstone, a South African who is Jewish.

The team issued its findings, known as the "Goldstone report," in late September. It concluded that both Israel and Palestinian armed groups had committed war crimes as well as possibly "crimes against humanity." Israel, it said, had committed "serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law ... in the context of its military operations in Gaza."

The report said both Israel and the authorities in Gaza should be required to conduct investigations and prosecutions and report to the Security Council within six months.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately seized the opportunity to deflect attention away from the growing pressure on Israel to stop settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. Assailing the findings as biased and anti-Israel, he declared that Israeli-Palestinian peace talks would not resume unless the report was shelved.

The Obama administration, anxious not to derail its push for peace negotiations, tried to get the Palestinians not to press for wider UN action on the report, but this effort backfired. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas first acceded to the U.S., but after a firestorm of protest from Palestinians, he switched and pushed for UN action. The UN General Assembly was scheduled to take up the issue today.

http://www.peoplesworld.org/un-gaza-report-becomes-political-football/

[aranthus]

1. Becomes? It was always about politics. n/t