[Gaza] UN investigation 'not credible' - cont'd

Press TV 090915
[LinkTV/Mosaic]
- A United Nations fact-finding mission, which has just concluded an investigation into last year's brutal conflict in Gaza, makes a strong case for war crimes charges against Israel for its unrelenting 22-day military attacks on Palestinians, largely civilians, including women and children. The charges stem mostly from serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. The UN team, lead by Justice Richard Goldstone, says there is also evidence that Palestinian armed groups, specifically Hamas, committed war crimes in their repeated mortar attacks on civilians on southern Israel. But its strongest indictment is against the state of Israel which is accused of imposing a blockade on Gaza 'amounting to collective punishment' carried out as part of a 'systematic policy of progressive isolation and deprivation of the Gaza Strip'. Israel refused to co-operate with the investigation, saying the UN human rights council, which ordered it, was biased against the state.
- Besides Goldstone, a former prosecutor of the International tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the UN team comprised Christine Chinkin, professor of international law at the London School of Economics and Political Science; Hina Jilani, advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and a member of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur; Colonel Desmond Travers, a former officer in Ireland's Defence Forces and a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for International Criminal Investigations.

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• Israel
• Palestine
• Gaza
• Hamas
• warcrimes
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