Jerusalem - Israel Friday rejected a UN General Assembly resolution that gives it three months to launch an independent and credible investigation into allegations that it committed war crimes during last winter's Gaza war. Although the resolution called on the Palestinians to launch an investigation into allegations that Gaza militants too committed war crimes by firing rockets at Israel, the Hamas movement ruling the coastal enclave welcomed the resolution.
Hamas hailed it an "important accomplishment" for the Palestinians. The radical Islamist movement claimed it would not object to forming a commission to look into the allegations against itself.
In Israel, a heated debate is taking place whether it should comply with the demand for an independent inquiry.
Defence Minister Ehud Barak is vehemently against such a probe, but the country's military chief of staff as well as its attorney- general are strongly in favour, viewing it as a way to avoid prosecutions against Israeli political and military figures at the International Criminal Court.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not committed himself.
The resolution, adopted by a 114-18 vote on Thursday, endorsed a UN Human Rights Council report on the Gaza offensive, and ordered Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to send the report on to the Security Council for debate and a vote.
The General Assembly adopted the report's recommendations that both Israel and Hamas should be brought before the International Criminal Court, unless they launch serious probes of their own into "strong evidence" that both committed war crimes.
However, Israel charged that the large number of abstentions (44), combined with the 18 member states who voted against, meant that the Arab-drafted resolution lacked the support of a "moral majority."
"Israel rejects the resolution of the UN General Assembly, which is completely detached from realities on the ground that Israel must face," the country's Foreign Ministry said in a statement sent to journalists.
"Israel, like any other democratic nation, maintains the right to self-defence," it said.
The report adopted by the General Assembly was written by a fact- finding mission into the Gaza offensive, headed by South African judge Richard Goldstone.
Israel launched the December 27 - January 18 offensive after eight years of near-daily rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza which had been paralyzing life in its southern communities.
But its massive bombing, shelling and ground campaign against Hamas targets in the densely-populated strip killed around 1,400 Palestinians in 23 days, the highest death-toll in at least four decades of on-and-off violence in Israel and the Palestinian areas.
Well over half of the Palestinian dead were civilians, rights groups say. Thirteen Israelis were killed by Hamas rockets and in the ground fighting.
The main allegations in the Goldstone report are that Israel failed to take sufficient and effective care to avoid civilian deaths, used white phosphorous smokescreens in built-up areas, held Palestinians for questioning in harsh conditions, and that its soldiers forced, at times at gunpoint, Palestinian civilians to search the homes of militants.
Israel has charged that the report was mandated by a "discredited" Human Rights Council with an automatic anti-Israel majority, and is one-sided and prejudiced.
It has engaged in a mammoth diplomatic effort to prevent the report's referral from the Human Rights Council in Geneva to the General Assembly and the Security Council in New York.
The biggest-selling Yediot Ahronot daily Friday called the report's adoption by the General Assembly a "tough blow" for Israel.
Israel now plans to try and enlist the support of seven members in the Security Council to prevent it from debating the report.
The Palestinian permanent observer to the General Assembly said the resolution's adoption marked "a very important night" for the international institution.
The West Bank-based Palestinian Authority of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas had initially agreed, after US and Israeli pressure, to postpone seeking a UN vote, but reversed his decision under domestic pressure.
In Gaza City, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuchri hailed the General Assembly resolution as "the first international condemnation of the Israeli occupation for committing war crimes during its aggression against Gaza."
