Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, embraced a US suggestion in an effort to calm a global furor over the killing of nine pro-Palestinian activists in Monday's naval commando operation.
Turkish and foreign pro-Palestinian activists from the ship arrived in Istanbul to a hero's welcome and levelled charges of "war crimes" and unjustified killings at the Israeli marines who stormed the cruise liner Mavi Marmara.
In the occupied West Bank, US Middle East envoy George Mitchell said the "tragedy of the last week" must not undermine indirect negotiations he is mediating between Israel and the Palestinians, which he said were making some progress.
The head of a Turkish charity that organized the flotilla of ships carrying relief supplies in an attempt to break Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip said activists had grabbed guns from 10 soldiers in self-defense and thrown the weapons overboard without having fired them.
"We told our friends on board: 'We will die, become martyrs, but never let us be shown... as the ones who used guns'," said Bulent Yildirim, chairman of the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief.
Israeli officers say their men opened fire to save their lives and that two of the ship's passengers shot at them with pistols seized from marines.
But Yildirim, who was aboard the Mavi Marmara, said: "By this decision, our friends accepted death, and we threw all the guns we took from them into the sea."
The United States, less outspoken than most of Israel's enemies and friends over the incident, backed calls from the European Union, Turkey and the United Nations for some form of international inquiry.
US Vice President Joe Biden suggested an Israeli probe with international involvement.
Israel has defended the interception, saying its Gaza blockade was aimed at preventing the Palestinian territory's Hamas Islamist rulers from bringing in large quantities of Iranian long-range rockets.
SOUTH KOREAN EXAMPLE
"I am in favor of an investigation. We have enough high-level legal experts ... if they want to take on observers from the outside, they can invite observers," Lieberman said on Israel Radio.
"I propose we use South Korea as an example," he said, referring to an investigation launched by Seoul that included experts from the United States, Australia, Britain and Sweden, after the sinking of one of its warships in March.
The inquiry concluded that a North Korean submarine fired the torpedo that sank the Cheonan corvette, killing 46 sailors.
Israel wants any probe to focus on the legality and operational details of the commando raid rather than on its four-year-old blockade of Gaza and the humanitarian situation.
Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told Army Radio: "There is a need for an investigation to draw lessons," an apparent reference to the military performance in the operation.
Israelis have been shocked by video of commandos being winched onto the ship's deck from helicopters only to be outnumbered and set upon with clubs by activists. Footage also showed an activist with a knife stabbing a soldier.
Yildirim said he saw the commandos firing rubber bullets from close range before switching to live ammunition, after some of the activists attacked them with chairs and bats.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an unrepentant defense of the Gaza blockade, lambasting European and other governments for "hypocrisy" in challenging Israel's efforts to prevent the Iranian-backed Islamists from arming.
The Foreign Ministry dismissed a vote by the United Nations Human Rights Council, a forum Israel says is deeply biased against it, to form an independent fact-finding mission to look into what it called violations of international law.
Israel was stung by a UN inquiry into the three-week offensive it launched in the Gaza Strip in December 2008 which found evidence that its forces committed war crimes, allegations Israeli leaders denied.
Three Turkish planes brought some of a total of about 700 people detained on the convoy from Tel Aviv to Turkey. They also carried the simple wooden coffins of the nine killed.
Their identities are still uncertain, though Israel has said it believes most of them were Turks.
Several of those released by Israel accused the Israeli army of destroying evidence, and Yildirim said soldiers shot a doctor who wanted to surrender and threw bodies into the sea.
Those allegations could not be verified independently.
Kevin Ovenden of Britain said a man who had pointed a camera at the soldiers was shot dead through the forehead.
The killings of Turks onboard the flotilla has brought the already strained relationship between the Jewish state and Turkey's Islamist-leaning government close to breaking point.
Turkey recalled its ambassador and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, charging Israel with "state terrorism" has called for those responsible for the deaths to be punished.
Lieberman said Turkey, once a close ally of Israel, "bore all the blame" and had sent a ship full of "hooligans with knives and metal bars."
In an interview with the US television network PBS, Biden backed Israel's right to board ships bound for Gaza to prevent weapons smuggling, but said Washington was concerned about the plight of people there.
But he said the United States also needed to "put as much pressure and as much cajoling on Israel as we can" to allow in aid shipments such as building materials.
