MID: UN report on Gaza war a 'kangaroo court': Netanyahu
By Gavin RabinowitzFri Sep 18 04:18:10 EST 2009
Thu Sep 17 18:18:10 UTC 2009
JERUSALEM, Sept 17 AFP - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has condemned a damning UN report on the Gaza war as a "kangaroo court", saying it was biased from the start.
The UN probe said both Israel and Palestinian groups committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the 22-day war in December-January that Israel launched in response to rocket fire from the Palestinian enclave.
The report was "a kangaroo court; it was fixed from the start," Netanyahu told Israel's privately-owned Channel Two television on Thursday, speaking publicly for the first time on the report.
Netanyahu called on the international community to condemn the report, which reserved some of its harshest language for the actions taken by Israel against the civilian population in the densely populated Gaza Strip.
"The report encourages terrorism and undermines the natural right of states to defend themselves," Netanyahu said. "If you support our right to self-defence, say so now."
Earlier in the day, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman denied Israeli forces committed atrocities during the Gaza war, describing the report as "hypocrisy".
"We share very human values and Israel's army is maybe the most human army in the world. We are fighting for our independence since 1948," he said in Podgorica, Montenegro.
But South African judge Richard Goldstone, who headed the commission that issued the report, rejected Israeli criticism that it was biased.
"I deny that completely," Goldstone said in remarks broadcast on public radio. "I was completely independent, nobody dictated any outcome, and the outcome was a result of the independent inquiries that our mission made."
The UN report, which Goldstone presented at the UN on Tuesday and which accused both Israel and Palestinian militants of committing war crimes, has faced stinging criticism in Israel for being one-sided and biased.
But Goldstone, former chief prosecutor on the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, rejected the charges and said the only thing he regretted was that Israel refused to cooperate with his team.
"There is really nothing I can think of that I would do differently," he said.
"If there is any difference that I would have preferred, (it) would have been that we could have got cooperation from Israel and, in particular, I would have liked the Israeli government to assist us and decide what we should investigate because that's what I asked them to do."
The impartial inquiry, which became known as the Goldstone Commission, was widely credited with preventing South Africa's slide into widespread violence with the demise of the whites-only apartheid regime.
