U.N. Human Rights Council Shelves Divisive Report on Gaza War - washingtonpost.com

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By Howard Schneider and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 3, 2009

JERUSALEM, Oct. 2 -- The U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday shelved a controversial report on Israel's recent war in the Gaza Strip, averting a crisis in the push to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks but potentially scuttling efforts to initiate broad war-crimes prosecutions over the conflict.

Palestinian officials dropped their support for a scheduled Friday vote on the report after intense lobbying from the Obama administration, which argued that action on the study would "backfire" by driving Israel away from possible peace talks and strengthening opposition among Western countries worried about similar investigations of their soldiers.

A fact-finding mission chaired by former South African judge Richard Goldstone concluded that there is evidence of war crimes by Israeli soldiers and Hamas fighters and said that if the two sides did not conduct independent investigations, the International Criminal Court should consider prosecutions. The government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu responded angrily that the panel's findings undermined the right of nations to self-defense by playing down Hamas's rocket attacks on Israel in the years before the three-week winter war.

Israeli officials said this week that if the Geneva-based Human Rights Council forwarded the report to the U.N. General Assembly, the action would all but end hopes for restarting peace negotiations -- a message reinforced by U.S. officials in talks with Palestinians.

White House special envoy George J. Mitchell has been meeting this week in Washington with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, and President Obama has set a mid-October deadline for efforts to restart direct talks between them.

"We said we have to keep our eye on the ball," said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I think they [the Palestinians] recognized that to push this up the hill, it could really backfire."

Israeli officials did not comment on the decision. Human Rights Watch urged the United States either to press for Israel and Hamas to conduct their own probes or to support their referral to the International Criminal Court.

"The larger danger is that it legitimizes the Netanyahu argument that democratic states can't be constrained in the way they fight terrorism -- that enforcing respect for the rules is an inherent challenge to the right of self-defense," Tom Malinowski, director of Human Rights Watch's Washington office, said of the decision.

While defusing an issue for Netanyahu's government, the delay is a potential blow to the political standing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

The Palestinian leader is being pulled by Washington toward renewed negotiations despite the inability of Mitchell and Obama to coax Israel into agreeing to freeze the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank -- a step Abbas felt would broaden Palestinian support for the talks. Along with his attendance at a meeting with Netanyahu in New York last week, the delay in action on the Goldstone report marks a second big accommodation to the United States.

"These developments in New York and now in Geneva have affected negatively the slightly improving public position of our leadership. It is disappointing on all levels," said Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian Authority spokesman.

Abbas was already caught in the middle of the Gaza conflict, a ground and air war directed at his main rival, the Islamist Hamas movement. Abbas holds power only in the West Bank, and he used the security forces under his control to tamp down protests as Israel rolled into Gaza, which Hamas had seized in 2007. More than 1,100 Palestinians were killed in the war, according to Israeli officials, while officials in Gaza say more than 1,400 died, including hundreds of civilians. Thirteen Israelis were killed.

Hamas criticized the delay in Geneva as a sign of Abbas's "collusion" with Israel.

Also Friday, Hamas celebrated the release of 20 Palestinian prisoners traded for a videotape sent to Israel of captured soldier Gilad Shalit. Held for more than three years since being seized in a cross-border raid, the 23-year-old soldier appeared relaxed and healthy on the 2 1/2 -minute video, which was shown on national television and offered the first tangible proof of his condition.

Lynch reported from New York.