The
US House of Representatives has rejected as "irredeemably biased" the
findings of a UN-sponsored report which says Israel committed war
crimes during its military assault on the Gaza Strip.
The house on Tuesday voted 344 to 36 in favour of a non-binding
resolution calling on Barack Obama, the US president, to maintain his
opposition to the report, which was written by a panel led by Richard
Goldstone, a South African judge.
The
report accused Israel and the Palestinian Hamas group, which has de
facto control of Gaza, of war crimes during the 22-day conflict in
December and January.
But most of its criticism was directed towards Israel's conduct
during the offensive, in which human rights organisations say about
1,400 Palestinians - many of them women and children - were killed.
Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, were also killed over the course of the war, Israel has said.
Steny
Hoyer, the Democrat House majority leader, said it was important to
adopt an official resolution against the Goldstone report as it "paints
a distorted picture".
It "epitomizes the practice of singling Israel out from all other nations for condemnation," he said on Tuesday.
UN assembly pressure
The US house vote came a day before the United Nations General
Assembly is expected to debate its own resolution endorsing the
findings of the Goldstone report.
Al
Jazeera's Kristen Saloomey, reporting from the UN in New York, said
that while the majority of the assembly's member nations were expected
to vote in favour of the resolution, the US vote on Tuesday, although
non-binding, was likely to dampen its impact.
"Remember - the key recommendation of Goldstone is to get a credible
investigation into the alleged war crimes that the Goldstone commission
found evidence of in Gaza, and the UN Security Council is the only body
that can move forward and demand an investigation," she said.
"The general assembly just does not have that power. Of course, on
the security council, the United States is a veto-wielding member and,
as the congressional vote underscores, the US is not going to be
interested in moving forward in the security council to call for an
investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC), or anyone else
for that matter."
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian representative
to the UN, criticised the Security Council for so far failing to act
"in triggering the mechanism that Goldstone wanted, the investigation,
the monitoring and then reporting after six months before considering
moving into the ICC".
"The General Assembly, in a responsible way in the draft we have
submitted by the Arab group, which hopefully in the next two days will
receive large support, has taken some of the responsibility from the
security council ... and asked for the investigation to begin," he told
Al Jazeera.
The United Nations Human Rights Council, which sponsored the Goldstone commission, has already voted to endorse the report.
Bias claims
Steven Rothman, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, told Al
Jazeera that the report was biased against Israel, even after the
Goldstone commission's mandate was expanded so that it could
investigate war crimes alleged to have been committed by Hamas.
"The report was not written
to talk about 12,000 rockets intentionally sent by Hamas to slaughter
Israeli men, women and children, versus the Israelis trying in many
respects to minimise the damage to Palestinian civilians," he told Al
Jazeera.
"So there have been completely different standards applied."
But when asked if he had read the Goldstone report in full, Rothman said he had read only the report's executive summary.
"I did not read the 400 or 500 pages, but I read the executive
summary designed for members of congress and other world leaders to
read, and I found it terribly, terribly biased and one-sided," he said.
But
Brian Baird, a Democrat congressman for Washington state, said that the
resolution failed to "accurately characterise" the Goldstone report and
made no attempt to reflect the situation on the ground in Gaza.
"My belief is that it is incumbent on all of us who care about
justice and peace in the region to look equally, with an equally
critical eye, and all sides of this argument," he told Al Jazeera.
"One of the important elements of working towards peace and justice
is that if someone of the calibre of Justice Goldstone, with the
deligence and thoroughness of his investigation, ... reports on the
kind of events that occured that merits further consideration.
"The resolution before us in the House would block that."
Goldstone clarifications
The result of Tuesday's vote had been widely anticipated.
In
January, as Israel bombarded the Palestinian territory, the House had
overwhelmingly backed a resolution "recognising Israel's right to
defend itself against attacks from Israel".
The influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) had
lobbied strongly for the latest resolution and said it "strongly
applauded" the House's action on Tuesday.
Goldstone last week
sent a letter to the US House of Representatives saying that the text
of the US resolution had "factual inaccuracies and instances where
information and statements are taken grossly out of context".
He offered several rejections and clarifications of the ideas expressed in the resolution.
In response to Goldstone's criticism, three parts of the resolution
were amended on Tuesday to clarify that Goldstone had sought an
expansion to the commission's mandate so that his team could
investigate claims that Hamas had violated international law during the
Gaza war.
The Goldstone report, which accused Israel of using
"disproportionate force" and of deliberately targeting civilians,
called for independent investigations to be held into Israel's and
Hamas's conduct during the war.
The report called for the cases to be referred to the ICC in The
Hague if Israel and Hamas do not investigate the war crimes allegations
against them within six months.
Hamas has agreed to hold such an investigation, but Israel has not.
