Complete with breathless, uncritical and downright wrong-headed reporting by the BBC:

There is evidence that both Israeli and Palestinian forces committed war crimes in the recent conflict in Gaza, a long-awaited official UN report says.

It accuses Israel of deliberately using “disproportionate force” in the three-week operation in December and January.

The report also condemned rocket attacks by Palestinian groups which Israel says sparked its offensive.

Palestinians and human rights groups say more than 1,400 Gazans were killed, but Israel puts the figure at 1,166.

Three Israeli civilians and 10 Israeli soldiers were also killed.

Israel, which had refused to co-operate with the UN fact-finding team, said the report was “clearly one-sided”.

The military operation was a result of disrespect for the fundamental principle of ‘distinction’ in international humanitarian law

The investigation, led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, found evidence “indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict”, a UN statement said.

Israel also “committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity”.

The Israeli operations, the document states, “were carefully planned in all their phases as a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population”.

Civilian targets

The report accuses Israel of imposing “a blockade which amounted to collective punishment” in the lead-up to the conflict.

It says “the Israeli military operation was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole”.

ANALYSIS

Tim Franks, BBC News, Jerusalem

If this report is to matter, it will be for a number of reasons. One is its length. There have been a slew of reports into the war in Gaza. This is the lengthiest, weighing in at 575 pages.

There is the man who wrote it: Richard Goldstone is a judge and judicial investigator with an impressive record. The UN Human Rights Council, for whom he wrote this, is also no longer a body which is quite as easy for Israel to dismiss as a congenitally biased. The US has recently run for, and been elected to a seat on its council.

Mr Goldstone has also shown a measure of political astuteness. This is not the first time that Israel, or Palestinian militants, have been accused of war crimes – and in Israel’s case, crimes against humanity as well. But previous allegations have quickly begun to moulder on the shelf.

Mr Goldstone recommended that the Security Council require Israel, and the Gaza authorities, to report in six months about its own investigations into the alleged crimes. If they did not come up to scratch, then the International Criminal Court should become involved. Who, said Judge Goldstone, could object to that?

The reports says Israel must be held accountable for its actions during the war, a process which could lead to the conflict being referred to the International Criminal Court.

The report found there was also evidence that Palestinian groups had committed war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity, in their repeated rockets and mortars attacks on Israel.

It says the launching of rockets which “cannot be aimed with precision at military targets” breaches the fundamental principle of sparing civilian lives.

“Where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into civilian areas, they constitute a deliberate attack against the civilian population,” it said.

It also calls for the immediate release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier seized in a Palestinian raid in 2006 and taken to Gaza.

Both the Israeli and Palestinian authorities are criticised for the treatment of their own civilians during the conflict.

Israel’s interrogation of political activists and repression of criticism of its activities had “contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent was not tolerated”, it said.

Meanwhile, the alleged “arbitrary arrests” and “extra-judicial executions” of Palestinians by the authorities in both Gaza and the West Bank were also criticised.

‘No mandate’

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev told the BBC the report had been “born in sin” and had no mandate for its investigation.

The authorities in Gaza and the West Bank did co-operate with the UN mission, but Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, has also dismissed the report as “political, unbalanced and dishonest”.

Israel said the conflict was to end rockets attacks from Gaza

Ismael Radwan, a senior Hamas official in Gaza, was quoted by AFP news agency as saying it “puts on the same level those who perpetrate crimes and those who resist”.

Mr Goldstone rejected such allegations, and told the BBC that “fair minded people” should read the report and “at the end of it, point out where it failed to be objective or even-handed”.

The 574-page document recommends that authorities in both Israel and Gaza be required to investigate the allegations and report to the UN Security Council within six months.

The Israeli military insists troops acted lawfully during the conflict.

The government says it has carried out more than 100 investigations into allegations of abuses by its forces – most were dismissed as “baseless” but 23 criminal investigations are still pending.

It reiterated that it was “committed to acting fully in accordance with international law and to examining any allegations of wrongdoing by its forces”.

The full report – which is based on 188 interviews, more than 10,000 pages of documentation and 1,200 photographs and other material – will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council at the end of this month.

Eight months after the conflict, very little reconstruction has taken place in Gaza because of the strict Israeli-imposed blockade which bans all but essential supplies from entering the enclave.

The stated aim of the blockade is to weaken Hamas’s leadership but aid agencies say it serves only to punish the civilian population.

First of all, let’s take a look at Tim Franks’ ‘analysis’:

• Why should a report ‘matter’ simply because it is 575 pages long? The phone book in my home is longer than that – but no-one reads it

• Mr. Goldstone may have an ‘impressive record’ – but this counts for nothing if the report he attaches his good name to was commissioned (and its terms of reference framed) by one of the most racist, anti-Semitic groups in existence – the UN Human Rights Council. We won’t go into the provenance of this disgraceful, vehemently anti-Israel cabal here – City Journal has a superb primer written by Michael Weiss and Ibn Warraq, which you can read at your leisure.

• Whilst we cautiously welcome the election of the US to a seat at the UNHRC (although this welcome would had been far more hearty had the representative been someone of the calibre of John Bolton and not some Obama flunky), any involvement by America is unlikely to be significant in this case, due to its post facto timing. But why is Franks even bringing it up in this context? It’s as if he’s saying that Israel has hitherto been using its wholly-justifiable criticism of the UNHRC as an excuse; and now that America has a place at the table the reasons for this criticism will somehow evaporate –  the recalcitrant child of Israel will be called to account by the righteous Obama administration. Ridiculous whimsy (or wish fulfillment, perhaps?) which betrays a lack of understanding of the politics involved, not to mention personal bias.

• Just what does Franks suppose will happen if Goldstone refers the matter to the ICC? Israel is neither a signatory to the ICC Treaty, nor a member state. Furthermore, the matter falls cleanly outside the ICC’s territorial jurisdiction under its own rules.

The Goldstone report is, we believe, what in legal circles is known as ‘fruit of the poison tree’. No matter what the integrity of Judge Goldstone and his team, the report was commissioned by a corrupt and racist organisation and informed by vehemently anti-Israel ‘Human Rights’ bodies (who seem to be more interested in the rights of some humans than others).

In other words, as the sources of the information used in the report are tainted, no amount of legitimacy purportedly brought by Goldstone’s involvement can make this report anything more than just another smear – another blood libel – against Israel.

The so-called ‘war crimes’ committed by Israel in defending herself  against the murderous thugs of Hamas included the fact that civilian collateral damage was caused.

This is hardly surprising when Hamas use schools (UN-funded schools at that) as mortar and rocket-launching bases, whilst civilians and children are in the buildings.

Who is the war criminal here? Israel, for neutralising the source of the attack (and it’s worth pointing out here that the IDF usually carries out massive leaflet-dropping operations prior to such defensive actions) – or the Hamas murderers who force human shields to remain in place and then cite any consequent deaths or injuries as evidence of ‘Israeli aggression’?

There is a massive, unexplained blind spot exhibited by the Human Rights NGOs and the UN when it comes to this practice – and this moves from the sublime to the ridiculous when they then go on to ascribe the inevitable resulting ‘war crimes’ to Israel.

In the strange world of the UNHRC – The aggressors are the victims and the perpetrators are the innocent. This distortion becomes even more surreal when you discover that the Goldstone Report counts Hamas operatives and known terrorists in the numbers for civilian casualties.

In summary, this report can have no credibility whatsoever, born as it was out of pre-existing bias and hatred against Israel and the Alice-in-Wonderland logic of the Islamic-controlled UNHRC – an organisation that has been critisised even by the leader of the UN himself for bias against Israel (Tim Franks helpfully omits this fact, presumably in an attempt to streamline his article).

It provides yet more damning evidence of the increasing irrelevance of the United Nations in the modern world.

[Main story: BBC Online]

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