Israel Matzav

A call for honesty from Judge Goldstone

In a November 2010 interview, Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hamad acknowledged that the number of Hamas terrorists who were killed in Operation Cast Lead was far closer to the 709 claimed by the IDF than to the "one in five casualties" claimed by the Goldstone Report. Maurice Ostroff wonders why the would-be-future-Secretary-General of the United Nations has yet to acknowledge that Israel was right, and that the 'Palestinians' and the European-financed NGO's on whom he relied were wrong.

It has been a considerable time since I last wrote an open letter to you, but I believe that you will not only be willing but anxious to clarify questions that have arisen as a result of the widely publicized statement by Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad in his interview with Al-Hayat last November 1. The Minister quoted figures of combatant casualties in the Cast Lead Operation that according to Islamic News 'roughly match the 709 "terror operatives" that the military of Israel said it had killed during the fighting which included members of the Hamas-run police force'

Fathi Hammad's figures contradict the ratio of one in five of the persons killed being a combatant as reported by PCHR and Al Mezan that was accepted seriously by your Mission as stated in clause 361 of the Report. It is now obvious that your Mission was mistaken in accepting the reports of various NGO's while summarily rejecting the detailed counterclaims by the Government of Israel that has now been vindicated, namely, that at that stage Israel had recorded the names of 1,166 Palestinians killed, 709 of them identified as operatives of Hamas and various other terror organizations and that 295 uninvolved Palestinians were killed during the operation, 89 of them under the age of 16, 49 of them women and that in addition, there were 162 names of men that had not yet been attributed to any organization.

You have said in the past that the information the Mission received would not be admissible as evidence in a criminal court and I have difficulty in reconciling this with the statement in clause 361 of your report which states "The counterclaims published by the Government of Israel fall far short of international law standards". In the circumstances it is fair to ask whether the claims by the NGO's which the Mission accepted and which have since proved to be unreliable, met these law standards.

The realization that the mission was very mistaken in its belief that statistics from non-governmental sources are generally consistent, as stated in clause 361, should raise a red flag in evaluating other claims made by them, which should now be re-examined.

Read the whole thing. And don't hold your breath waiting for Goldstone to admit he was wrong. He's too pompous for that.

Labels: Fathi Hamad, Goldstone Report, Maurice Ostroff, Operation Cast Lead, Richard Goldstone

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:34 PM