UNGA opens debate on Gaza report

UNITED NATIONS - The UN General Assembly is expected this week to endorse a report that is heavily critical of the Israeli bombing of Gaza last winter, and said that it found evidence that Israel and Palestinian activists had each committed war crimes during the conflict.
On Wednesday, the UNGA began debating a draft resolution calling on Israel and the Palestinians to investigate accusations of human rights violations within the next three months. The resolution would also formally embrace the findings of the mission and call upon UN Chief Ban Ki-moon to take the report to the UNSC.
But the resolutions calls for investigation are non-binding, and no meaningful action is likely in the Security Council because the US, a staunch ally of Israel, has opposed the reports findings, has veto power on the panel.
The resolution, introduced by more than a dozen Arab states, including Iraq, cites serious human rights violations and grave breaches of international humanitarian law.
The Gaza inquiry, led by the respected South African judge and former war-crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone, condemned Palestinian activists for launching rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, but it levelled its harshest criticism at Israels conduct throughout the three-week war and its blockade of Gaza.
It called Israels actions a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.
The Palestinian observer at the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, said on Wednesday that codifying the reports findings would bring some justice to Palestinian people harmed during last years incursion into Gaza.
But American and Israeli diplomats have claimed the UN fact-finding mission was one-sided and flawed, and they have said the diplomatic foray to accept its conclusions could throw up more barriers to the stalled peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
Last month, the US was one of six members of the UNs Human Rights Council to vote against a measure that endorsed the report, and earlier this week, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to condemn it as irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.
Addressing the 192-member General Assembly, the Assembly President, Ali Treki said that without justice, there could be no peace in the Middle East.
Let us be clear what is at stake here - the human rights of nearly 2 million civilians are at stake, the President said. Without justice, there can be no progress towards peace. Let us commit together - to leave all politics and selectivity at the door and take up the cause of justice based on one universal set of rules - we should protect the rights of the victims.
The question before us is simple - despite the political sensitivities associated with it, he said. We have to answer whether respect to human rights is universal or not - whether we be divided on human rights issues or should we remain united behind advocating their respect all over the world.