More Discrediting of Goldstone

Justice Goldstone as Head of the UN Mission repeatedly insisted that the Mission was not a judicial inquiry and so "could not reach judicial conclusions". On this basis that he justified the inclusion of partisan mission members, admitting that their involvement "would not be appropriate for a judicial inquiry'.

However, now that we can read the Report, it is clearly highly judicial in nature, reaching conclusive judicial determinations of guilt, and including 'detailed legal findings' even in the absence of the sensitive intelligence information which Israel did not feel able to provide.

These determinations are made notwithstanding the Report's admission that it does not "pretend to reach the standard of proof applicable in criminal trials".

This alone discredits the report from the outset.

In the report itself there are an incredible number of inaccuracies:-

a) “The Mission found no evidence that members of Palestinian armed groups engaged in combat in civilian dress. It can, therefore, not find a violation of the obligation not to endanger the civilian population in this respect."

The Geneva protocol I article 37 paragraph 1 states: “ It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. The following acts are examples of perfidy:
(a) the feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender;
(b) the feigning of an incapacitation by wounds or sickness;
(c) the feigning of civilian, non-combatant status; and
(d) the feigning of protected status by the use of signs, emblems or uniforms of the United Nations or of neutral or other States not Parties to the conflict.

And yet the mission found no evidence!! There are plenty of instances of Arab newspaper reports, Youtube videos and Hamas representatives making statements to the contrary and yet the mission did seem to be able to “find” this information.

b) In para 1720. The Mission also concludes that Israel, by deliberately attacking police stations and killing large numbers of policemen (99 in the incidents investigated by the Mission) during the first minutes of the military operations, failed to respect the principle of proportionality between the military advantage anticipated by killing some policemen who might have been members of Palestinian armed groups and the loss of civilian life. Therefore, these were disproportionate attacks in violation of customary international law. The Mission finds a violation of the right to life (Article 6 ICCPR) of the policemen killed in these attacks who were not members of Palestinian armed groups.

The clear conclusion is that if the majority of the 99 policemen killed in these specific attacks were members of armed groups, then Israel may have been justified in those attacks.

Well, guess what? The IDF released the names of those killed and the majority of the policemen they refer to were were members of terror groups.

Goldstone's flat-out statement that a majority were not members of armed groups is not true.

c) The Report pretends to investigate whether Hamas used Gazans as human shields. As it does so, it bends over backwards to give the impression that Hamas is innocent even as the evidence it brings shows the opposite.

In addition, there are the published reports in Arab media from January that Goldstone should have been aware of, saying that Hamas did force the Abd Rabbo family to stay where they were so that rockets could be fired from their neighborhood.

So here we have just a few examples of a totally biased report that ignored a lot of information that was available to it but hid this from the report since it would contradict the predetermined conclusions that were to be presented