Israel blasts UN's Gaza report, but trips up on excuses

Israel is furious with the United Nations over a report on last January's Gaza conflict, submitted to the UN Security Council this week that found Israel deliberately targeted both UN facilities and the Gazan civilians hiding inside during the fighting.

Israeli bombs and missiles struck a number of UN sites within Gaza during the conflict. The worst instance was the shelling by Israeli troops of the UNRWA (the United Nations agency for refugees in Gaza) headquarters while as many as 700 Palestinians were hiding inside, hoping the HQ would be a safe refuge from the fighting. The Israeli attack sparked a fire that destroyed the warehouse housing the bulk of the UN's emergency food and medical supplies for Gaza. At the time UN head Ban Ki-moon was said to be "outraged". After the war, UN investigators said they had "hundreds" of credible reports of alleged Israeli atrocities committed during the fighting in January.

The Israeli government slammed the UN report saying, among other things, that the report was "patently biased" and ignored Israeli findings into several of the instances cited (Israel investigated just a handful of alleged atrocities and essentially cleared their military of any wrong-doing). Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak also slammed the report and repeated the assertion that Israel did not deliberately target any UN facilities.

But in the very same report in Israel's Haaretz newspaper, Barak basically contradicts his earlier claim that UN facilities were not targeted by saying "if they [Hamas] had not used neutral bodies as human shields, it would have been possible to prevent a great deal of the harm caused to civilians," which implies that UN and other civilian sites were targeted by the Israelis because Hamas was using them as bases to launch attacks. In the aftermath of the attack on the UNRWA headquarters Israel first denied that it was their shells that hit the site, then said it was an accident, then said they targeted the site because Hamas was using it to launch mortar attacks against Israeli troops (blaming Hamas for any civilian deaths in the process), before going back to the 'fog of war' excuse.

The shifting Israeli stories about their actions in Gaza, along with the implication that since they were fighting a terrorist foe international laws governing warfare didn't apply to them, are why highly regarded international human rights groups, like Amnesty International, along with several European governments, continue to press for a full war crimes investigation into Israel's actions.