The leader of a United Nations panel that investigated Israel’s invasion of Gaza two years ago has retracted the central and most explosive assertion of its report — that Israel intentionally killed Palestinian civilians there.
Richard Goldstone, an esteemed South African jurist who led the panel of experts that spent months examining the Gaza war, wrote in an opinion article in The Washington Postthat Israeli investigations into the conflict “indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”
“If I had known then what I know now,” he wrote, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”
His article, which was posted on The Post’s Web site on Friday night, follows a report submitted two weeks ago by a committee of independent experts led by Mary McGowan Davis, a former New York judge, that said that Hamas had not conducted any internal investigations of its own but that Israel had devoted considerable resources in looking into more than 400 accusations of misconduct.
Mr. Goldstone’s article fell like a bomb in Israel, where many people considered the 2009 publication of the Goldstone report as one of the most harmful events in recent years. It was viewed as offering spurious justification for damaging accusations, which Israelis considered to be part of a campaign to delegitimize the state and label it as a war criminal.
“We face three major strategic challenges,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last year, “the Iranian nuclear program, rockets aimed at our citizens and Goldstone.”
On Saturday night, Mr. Netanyahu called on the United Nations to retract the entire Goldstone report. “Everything we said has proven to be true,” he said. “Israel did not intentionally harm civilians. Its institutions and investigative bodies are worthy, while Hamas intentionally fired upon innocent civilians and did not examine anything.”
“The fact that Goldstone backtracked,” Mr. Netanyahu added, “must lead to the shelving of this report once and for all.” The Goldstone report documented numerous examples of the mistreatment of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers, and he did not back away from those findings in his article in The Washington Post.
Efforts to reach Mr. Goldstone by telephone and e-mail on Saturday were unsuccessful. Farhan Haq, a deputy spokesman for the United Nations, said it was up to member nations to decide whether to re-evaluate the report.
Israel carried out its military campaign after years of rocket fire by Palestinian militants in Gaza against southern Israel. As many as 1,400 Gazans were killed during the three-week offensive in December 2008 and January 2009, including hundreds of civilians. Thirteen Israelis were also killed.
During the invasion, graphic images of human suffering were broadcast around the world, and after the fighting ended, the United Nations Human Rights Council asked Mr. Goldstone, who is Jewish, to head an investigation into Israel’s actions. He said he would do so on the condition that he could broaden his mandate to include Hamas’s conduct as well.
Israel considers the Human Rights Council to be deeply hostile to its interests and refused to cooperate with Mr. Goldstone or allow him into Israel to carry out his work.
He said in The Washington Post article that the restrictions hampered his efforts, although he added that the council’s “history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.”
He and his investigators spent weeks in Gaza under Hamas’s auspices. The panel’s report said that the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza — a flour mill, sewage plant, chicken coops, water wells, a cement plant and about 4,000 homes — and the deaths of hundreds of noncombatants could only be understood as intentional.
The report also said that Israel waged “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
In his Washington Post article, Mr. Goldstone retracted that assertion, saying, “The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion.”
Now, he said, Israeli investigators had presented evidence “that civilians were not intentionally harmed as a matter of policy.”
Israel had tried in the past year and a half to counter the Goldstone report. In January 2010, Israel sent a 40-page letter to the United Nations defending the credibility of its internal military investigation into the army’s conduct during the war. In July, the Israeli military said it had indicted a number of officers and soldiers for their actions in the Gaza war. The army said in a statement that the chief military prosecutor had decided to take disciplinary and legal action in four separate cases, including against a staff sergeant accused of deliberately shooting at least one Palestinian civilian who was walking with a group of people waving a white flag. It was a case that was included in the Goldstone report.
In addition, the chief military prosecutor ordered a criminal investigation by the military police into an airstrike on a house that killed 29 members of the Samouni family in Zeitoun, a district of Gaza City.
Mr. Goldstone referred to that case in his article, saying that a commander had apparently misread a drone image and that an officer was still under investigation in the matter.
The report by Ms. Davis, the former judge, was more critical of Israel than Mr. Goldstone acknowledged in his article. “Given the scale of this undertaking, much remains to be accomplished,” she wrote, “we noted that a number of investigations reportedly remain open.”
In addition, she noted, “there is no indication that Israel has opened investigations into the actions of those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead,” which was Israel’s name for the military operation.
In February, a group of Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups asked the United Nations Human Rights Council to take further action on the Goldstone report’s findings to ensure justice for the war’s victims.
The Goldstone report upset not only the government in Israel but also many on the left who said the harsh critique made it impossible for them to raise other concerns.
After the report, Mr. Goldstone was ostracized by Jewish communitites in South Africa and elsewhere, even though he had long expressed devotion to Israel. A year ago, there was an attempt to bar him from his grandson’s bar mitzvah in Johannesburg, although he was able to go.
