After conducting its own investigation into the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center released a report this month detailing its findings in an explicit side-by-side comparison to the U.N. Goldstone Report.
The report finds “four basic flaws” in the Goldstone Report: It does not deal with Hamas’ ideology; it minimizes the extent and gravity of the terrorist activity carried out against Israel from the Gaza Strip (for instance, it does not define rocket fire targeting Israeli civilians as a war crime); it does not deal with Hamas’ illegal military buildup in the Gaza Strip prior to the operation; and it ignores the aid Hamas (far from being isolated in the Gaza Strip) received from nearby terrorist states like Iran and Syria. Israel’s report delves into these facts, which were ignored by the Goldstone Report.
The report concludes that the two most serious flaws in the Goldstone Report are its “superficiality and reliance [on] information which is selective, biased, and sometimes fabricated, and in many instances was provided by Hamas.” In addition, the report explains, although “some of the information accessible to the authors of [Israel's] study was not available to the Goldstone Mission … the Mission systematically ignored vast amounts of available information which contradicted its central thesis or at least raised serious questions about its validity.”
The entire, well-documented report is available online here.
What do you think?