As time goes, truth of Gaza War fades out

Source: Xinhua

A migrant worker from Thailand in Israel died on Thursday after being wounded by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip.(Xinhua/AFP)

by David Harris

JERUSALEM, March 18 (Xinhua) -- These days it is pretty rare for visiting dignitaries to want to or to be allowed to enter the Gaza Strip from the Israeli border.

Either Israel makes the area off limits, or visitors choose to boycott Gaza because it is run by the Palestinian Islamic Hamas movement, which many in the West deem to be a terror organization.

Things change. Within a couple of weeks, Israel is giving access to the area to both European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Ashton entered Gaza on Thursday, and Ban is slated to be in the region soon.

The arrival of the VIPs in the Palestinian coastal enclave comes as UN High Commissioner for Refugees Navi Pillay said on Wednesday that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are taking seriously international demands that they properly investigate allegations of war crimes carried out during last year's fighting in and around Gaza.

However, despite the UN accusation and urge, neither Palestinian nor Israeli human rights organizations are optimistic about the prospect of a valid probe into the war in the future.

In her report to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), Pillay also addressed the ongoing humanitarian situation for Gazans.

"The blockade of Gaza has become more severe since the conclusion of Operation 'Cast Lead'," she said in the report, citing a massive Israeli offensive at the coastal enclave between December 2008 and January 2009, which left more than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israeli soldiers dead.

"The population of Gaza has not received adequate assistance or support to recover from the impact of this operation. While the rights to health and water are given special attention below, the full range of human rights of the Gaza population continues to be violated on a regular basis, in particular as a consequence of the blockade," said the report.

Many analysts say this needs to be the real focus of the international community, but it is the diplomatic fallout from the war that continues to make the headlines.

Following the fighting, the UN established a committee to investigate what happened in Gaza. The panel was headed by South African jurist Richard Goldstone.

The fact-finding mission, after five months of investigation, published a widely disputed report that said both Israeli army and Hamas fighters were likely guilty of war crimes and potentially of crimes against humanity.

In the wake of that report, pressure mounted on Israel and the Palestinians to conduct their own detailed inquiries into the events during the combat a year ago. That pressure was reflected in Pillay's document.

"The High Commissioner recommends that the government of Israel ... investigate without further delay, impartially and independently, in conformity with international standards, allegations of human rights violations committed by Israelis in the occupied Palestinian territories, bring those responsible for any violations to justice and provide effective redress to victims of violations," she stated.

Pillay did detail the efforts Israel has made thus far, but she stressed that they do not appear to have been conducted independently.

"All of the command investigations, special and ordinary, appear to rely predominantly, if not exclusively, on information provided by those potentially implicated in the violations," according to Pillay.

The 67-page report also criticized the Palestinians for their failure to act in the wake of the Gaza fighting and the Goldstone findings.

Both Palestinian Authority and Hamas recently established committees to investigate the Palestinian role in the fighting, but Pillay said "there is no indication of credible investigations having taken place. In addition, the late launching of these initiatives brings into question the commitment of responsible Palestinian authorities to satisfying the criterion that a remedy be prompt."

The fighting in Gaza is already a distant memory for many Palestinians, and any investigation is no longer seen as relevant or important, argued Bassem Eid, the executive director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.

Day by day the Palestinians are caught up in violence and political turmoil that leaves them reflecting on the last 24 hours, rather than events that happened months or years ago, Eid said on Thursday.

He believes Palestinians are also of the opinion that the UN and the UNHRC are largely toothless tigers. They feel nothing will come of the Goldstone report, as the history already tells the Palestinians that the UN cannot deliver.

"If the problem of the Palestinian refugees took the UN 63 years and it has not been resolved, imagine how many years the Goldstone report will take to implement its recommendations," said Eid.

On the Israeli side, the government believes that the steps it has already taken are sufficient, said Sarit Michaeli, spokeswoman for B'Tselem, a non-government organization focusing on human rights situation in the occupied territories.

B'Tselem's major beef with Israel is that its investigations to date have been internal by military police officers and other similar functionaries and have only examined specific cases during the fighting rather than taking in a more global look at policy.

"They don't look at suspicions that pertain to the choice of targets, the open-fire regulations," said Michaeli.

"The question is still open as to whether the troops operating during Cast Lead were operating on the basis of open-fire regulations that allowed them to fire against people who were not clearly participating in the hostilities," she added.

B'Tselem and other Israeli rights movements believe Israel is perfectly capable of conducting thorough independent investigations, but Michaeli said she would not comment on whether she thought it likely such an inquiry would take place.

The more time that passes, it appears the UN is less and less serious in its desire to learn what really happened during those three weeks in Gaza, said Eid. If he is correct then the families who lost loved ones, mainly in Gaza, but also in Israel, may never get the answers they seek.