Jerusalem - An Israeli human rights group on Wednesday urged the government to launch an independent probe into allegations of war crimes committed during last winter's Gaza war. The Jerusalem-based group, B'Tselem, said it knew of 21 internal investigations being conducted by the Israeli military into incidents in which Palestinian civilians were killed during the December 27 - January 18 offensive in the Gaza Strip.
But these, B'Tselem argued, were insufficient because the Israel Military Police Investigations Unit (MPIU), the body carrying out the probes, was an integral part of the military and therefore not independent.
The unit was also only probing whether individual soldiers broke the laws of war in a series of incidents reported to the military by, among others, human rights groups. But it was not investigating policy questions, such as whether the selection of targets, the open- fire orders given to soldiers, and the use of white phosphorous smoke screens in populated areas, were legal.
"The suspicions of breach of international law do not relate merely to the acts of individual soldiers in the field," B'Tselem said in a statement sent to journalists.
It issued the statement as the UN General Assembly was scheduled to debate a controversial report on the three weeks of fighting in Gaza, which accuses both Israel and the radical Islamist Hamas movement ruling the strip of having committed war crimes.
Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Danny Ayalon convened foreign ambassadors to Tel Aviv Tuesday, urging them to vote against the report's recommendation that both Israel and Hamas should be brought before the International Criminal Court, unless they launch credible, independent investigations of their own into war crimes suspicions.
