Goldstone: 'Israel can investigate Gaza war itself'

Those who didnt punish

By JONAH MANDEL
Not only IDF officers who allegedly committed war crimes, but also "officers who failed to punish those responsible" should be held accountable in Operation Cast Lead, Richard Goldstone said on Monday. Speaking on Channel 2, the South African judge who headed a UN commission that recently published a harsh report on alleged war crimes Israel committed during the Gaza operation reiterated his outrage over Israeli claims that the report would encourage terror, and insisted that an internal Israeli probe would have sufficed as far as the world's demand to investigate its actions during warfare. "Israel can [investigate itself], it's done it before," he told the television network. Last week, Goldstone expressed different sentiments on Jerusalem's self-investigatory capacities. "Unfortunately both Israel and Hamas have dismal records of investigating their own forces… While Israel has begun investigations into alleged violations by its forces in the Gaza conflict, they are unlikely to be serious and objective," he wrote in an op-ed piece published in The New York Times. In the Monday interview, Goldstone also denied "making comparisons between Israel and Hamas." "It's in the interests of all people that the facts should come up, and if crimes be committed, there should be accountability for them," he concluded.