Israel Demands Retraction of U.N. Gaza War Criticism

Israel on Sunday demanded the retraction of a United Nations report deeply critical of its deadly 2008-2009 offensive on the Gaza Strip after the main author expressed regret over the conclusions.

South African judge Richard Goldstone had faced down enormous criticism in Israel at the time over the report which accused both Israel and the Hamas rulers of Gaza of potential war crimes during the 22-day conflict.

But in a surprise about-turn on Saturday, he said he now believed that the U.N. council which commissioned his report had been biased against Israel.

He said his assessment had also been changed by the fact that whereas Israel had thoroughly investigated the concerns raised by his panel, Hamas had not.

"If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document," he wrote in a commentary piece in the Washington Post.

The report's findings had set the tone for widespread international condemnation of the Israeli assault on Hamas-ruled Gaza in which more than 1,400 people lost their lives, the vast majority of them Palestinians.

Israeli officials said the United Nations now needed to set the record straight.

"This is an extremely important development and right now we are multiplying our efforts to get this report rescinded," Defense Minister Ehud Barak told army radio on Sunday.

"I am going to give the issue my personal commitment," Barak said, adding that he deeply regretted the "harm already done" by the Goldstone report.

He was echoing remarks made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu late on Saturday.

"Goldstone himself has just confirmed what we all knew all along... I think our soldiers and army behaved according to the highest international standards," the premier said during a brief televised address.

"We expect this farce to be rectified immediately."

Netanyahu once again rejected the findings of the Goldstone Report, which came up with evidence of possible war crimes and crimes against humanity by both Israel and Hamas for targeting civilians.

The Israeli premier said the fact that long-time Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi -- now facing an uprising in his country -- was on the U.N. Human Rights Council that commissioned the report, made the findings especially dubious.

"There is no greater absurdity," he said.

In his opinion piece in the Post, Goldstone said he now concurred with Netanyahu that the council had a "history of bias against Israel".

"We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission," Goldstone wrote.

A U.N. committee of independent experts that followed up on the Goldstone Report's recommendations found that Israel "has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza".

In contrast, Hamas leaders "have not conducted any investigations" into the rocket and mortar attacks against Israel that were its grounds for going to war.

In Gaza, a spokesman for the Islamist movement said it would study the new comments from Goldstone and issue a statement later in the day.

Goldstone said allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the death and wounding of civilians in situations where his fact-finding mission could not reach "any other reasonable conclusion".

He said that while some incidents were validated in cases involving individual soldiers, Israeli investigations found that "civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy".

Goldstone recalled one of the most serious incidents his team investigated -- without Israel's cooperation due to its allegations that the investigators were biased -- when Israeli shelling of a Gaza home killed 29 members of the Al-Samouni family.

He noted that Israel's investigation into the attack found it was apparently due to a commander's misinterpretation of a drone image and that an officer was under investigation for having ordered the shelling.

"I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes," Goldstone wrote.