Gaza/Ramallah - The Islamist movement Hamas strongly condemned Friday a decision at the UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva to defer until March a vote on the Goldstone report which found Israel guilty of war crimes during its 22-day military onslaught on the Gaza Strip in early 2009. At issue in the aftermath of the decision was whether the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) had asked the Islamic Organization not to press for moving the report recommendations to the Security Council and postpone the decision for six months, heeding pressure from the United States and Israel.
Taher Nono, a Hamas government spokesman in Gaza, accused the PA of committing "a serious crime against our people, a betrayal to the blood of our martyrs and collaboration with the Zionist enemy and cooperation with it in the war and aggression on Gaza."
More than 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed during the incursion, which Israel said it undertook in retaliation against the constant launching of missiles fired by militants from the Gaza onto Israeli territory.
Nono said Hamas was willing to cooperate with the Islamic Organization and Arab countries to immediately bring the report to the Security Council.
He said that "not adopting the report means giving the green light to the occupation forces to carry out more war crimes against the Gaza Strip as long as it will not be held accountable for its actions with a Palestinian cover."
PA government spokesman Ghassan Khatib denied that the PA asked that the report be deferred.
"It is not true that the PA has withdrawn its support for the report of the fact-finding committee on Israeli wars crimes in Gaza," he said.
"These are inaccurate allegations and the truth is that the PA is insisting on the Goldstone report and asks the Human Rights Council and the UN to adopt it," he said.
What happened, explained Khatib, was that certain members of the Human Rights Council saw it better to postpone voting on the report for some time, without explaining why this decision was made.
The PA is not a member of the Human Rights Council but does have observer status. However, it can influence decisions in the council through Arab and Islamic member states.
