Israel's vicious counter-campaign against the UN fact-based report on its war on Gaza continues as the time approaches when further action will be considered, writes Amira Howeidy On Monday, 1 February, the Israeli media reported that the commander of the Israeli army's Gaza division, Brigadier General Eyal Eizenberg, and the commander of the Givati Brigade, Colonel Ilan Malka, were "disciplined" for authorising the shelling of a United Nations facility with white phosphorous during Israel's war on the Gaza Strip that started in December 2008 and lasted for 22 days. During that onslaught the Israeli military killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, and wounded or maimed approximately 5,000. Israel destroyed at least 2,000 buildings in addition to significant sectors of Gaza's infrastructure. Besieged by the Israeli occupation since June 2007, the Strip's 1.5 million population is denied construction material -- in addition to adequate food, medical and energy supplies -- and has not been able to repair the damage since. Known as Operation Cast Lead, the Gaza assault was Israel's seventh and latest war in the region. It stands out for its shocking brutality. The Israeli army's liberal use of white phosphorous munitions in densely populated areas meant that hundreds of Palestinian civilians were subject to the lethal chemical that burns flesh to the bone once in contact with oxygen. Doctors operating in Gaza at the time also pointed to mounting evidence that Israel used DIME, an experimental explosive biological weapon created by the US air force and that is packed with tungsten dust that forms a micro-shrapnel cloud upon detonation. Gaza hospitals spoke of the "clean tearing of limbs" that DIME can cause, according to the Christian Science Monitor on 14 January 2009. Unfortunately for Israel much of the gruesome scene was captured on camera, drawing international outrage. A year later, Israel has decided that only two military officers should be "disciplined" for the offensive, which was described by a UN fact-finding mission last September as amounting to "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity". In fact, had it not been for the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that formed a team of pioneering legal figures to investigate war crimes in Gaza and Israel during the 22-day military operation, it is unlikely that Israel -- an occupying power with a record of brutality and impunity -- would have probed its own war. Ever since the UNHRC passed in February 2009 a resolution to dispatch an independent mission to investigate the war, Israel has continued to attack the council. The UN Goldstone Mission, named after its head, South African judge Richard Goldstone, formed in April 2009 by the UN high commissioner for human rights, was lambasted by Israel as "political", despite Goldstone being a former member of the South African Constitutional Court, a former chief prosecutor of the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and also Jewish and a self-proclaimed "Zionist". When it came to the work of investigation, the Goldstone Mission was repeatedly denied entry to Israel, the latter having declared officially that it would "not cooperate" with the fact-finding effort, forcing Goldstone to work via public hearings that included Israeli and Palestinian victims alike. The outcome was a damning report submitted to the UNHRC on 29 September 2009. Although it accused both Israel and the Islamic resistance movement Hamas of "possibly" committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, the report contained an analysis of 36 specific incidents in Gaza compared to only a few in the West Bank and in Israel. In other words, the 575- page long report was mainly and primarily about Israeli, not Palestinian war crimes. Upon release, Israel immediately mounted a vigorous campaign to defame the report's conclusions. But an emergency meeting by the UN General Assembly in November endorsed the report's recommendations nonetheless. It recommended that if Israel and Hamas fail to investigate the alleged violations and undertake follow-up actions that meet international standards of objectivity within six months, then the Security Council should consider referring the whole issue of Israeli and Hamas violations to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. International human rights organisations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch both issued reports on the Gaza war, equally condemning Israel and to a much lesser degree Hamas. Now that the Goldstone deadline is approaching, the Israeli government -- which refused to recognise the Goldstone Report and described it as politically motivated -- has sent a 46-page report to the UN secretary-general, submitted on 29 January, explaining the Israeli judicial system. The Israeli communiqué included information on an internal Israeli inquiry into some of the accusations in the Goldstone Report, and defended the Israeli army's performance during the war. Parallel to this, an active pro-Israel (Western) media campaign surfaced during the past week that accused Goldstone of anti- Semitism, bringing Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January) into the affair. Reuters quoted Yuli Edelstein, a minister in the Israeli cabinet, as saying he was going to meet UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on the day of remembrance to suggest that the Goldstone Report had triggered recent attacks on Jews worldwide. Recent narratives alluding to the report, such as that of Israeli political commentator Alan Dershowitz in the popular US Huffington Post newszine, claimed that Israel went to "extreme lengths to avoid civilian causalities... in a manner that put Israeli soldiers at considerable risk." The Palestinian Authority submitted its response to the Goldstone Report on 29 January. According to the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, Hamas will submit its 52-page long response before the deadline for doing so of 5 February.
