Any report on alleged war crimes is going to be controversial. An investigation that focuses on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians will be even more sensitive. Thus the uproar surrounding the Goldstone report, an investigation into the behavior of the Israeli Army and Hamas militants during the war in the Gaza Strip nearly a year ago, was to be expected. But charges that the effort has been politicized obscure the key question of accountability. There must be limits to conflicts — even when waged by terrorists, freedom fighters, or other "political" groups.
The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict was chartered by the U.N. Human Rights Council in April to look into the behavior of the Israeli military and Hamas militants during the bloody conflict they waged in December 2008 and January 2009. Israel launched its forces into Gaza to root out militants who were using the territory to launch rocket attacks against its territory. Almost 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed during the three-week conflict.
Four jurists were named to the mission, which was chaired by Mr. Richard Goldstone, a respected former South African judge who was once lead prosecutor in war crimes investigations in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Rather than looking at the entire three-week war, the group investigated 36 incidents during the conflict that it considered representative. In a 575-page document, it concluded that Israel used disproportionate force, deliberately targeted civilians, used Palestinians as human shields and destroyed civilian infrastructure during its efforts to rid the Gaza Strip of the rockets that Palestinians had fired at Israel. It charged Palestinian militants — including Hamas, the group that now controls the Gaza Strip — of deliberately targeting civilians and trying to spread terror via rocket attacks on southern Israel.