Israel’s determination not to cooperate with the UN team assigned to investigate charges that the Jewish state perpetrated war crimes during its Gaza offensive six months ago leaves investigators with no option but to limit their work to within the coastal strip. The decision to deny the UN fact-finding mission access inside Gaza also demonstrates that Israel has something to hide.
If Israel continues to bar the UN commission from entering Gaza, there is nothing left for the 15-member team other than to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the war’s most prominent allegations, meet with Hamas officials, collect reports from Palestinian human rights groups, and interview Palestinian survivors of the Gaza onslaught. Israel will be left out and its side of the story will not be told. This is unfortunate, for the world would have wanted to know what Israel was thinking during the December-January onslaught which lasted for 22 days and which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, in a sustained attack on Gaza neighborhoods.
The Israeli government has invented terminology and ideology to claim that it was acting in self-defense. If this is the argument, the UN would like to hear the details but which do not appear to be forthcoming in lieu of Israel’s incessant criticism of the UN as being biased against it. But the world body has been careful in selecting its personnel for the task of uncovering the Gaza truth. Richard Falk, the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, is a top US professor of international law. Falk is also Jewish, as is the head of the fact-finding mission Richard Goldston who, according to news agencies, has close ties to Israel.
There is a danger that six months after the massacre, evidence of white phosphorus used in densely populated areas, or the use of biological and experimental weapons by Israel, could be compromised. By denying the mission access to Israeli military sources, the UNHRC investigators might not obtain evidence of international humanitarian law violations by specific Israeli individuals. These are problems Israel must address promptly. If it has no viable answers to these and other questions concerning its demonic actions in Gaza, then it should be viewed by the world for what it is. In maintaining its occupation of Palestinian territories, Israel has ignored dozens of UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions — and now a UN fact-finding mission — and has created such inhumane conditions for the Palestinian people that these conditions might reasonably be said to be intended to destroy the people under occupation in whole or in part.
Israel’s disproportionate use of force violated the most fundamental principles of international law. It was a violation of the laws of war to use disproportionate force against an occupied people. This violation is amplified when it is done with the goal of denying the occupied people their self-determination. Therefore, Israel’s action constituted a violation of the right to self-determination. And, finally, Israeli’s intentionally disproportionate use of force against the Palestinian people that has killed or wounded a significant percentage of those people is significant evidence that the crime of genocide was committed. This is what Israel is hiding from the UN and the world.
