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Goldstone: Officers who fail to punish war criminals are responsible too

Goldstone Officers who

Not only IDF officers who allegedly committed war crimes should be held responsible, but also "officers who failed to punish those responsible," 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 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza 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 Israeli 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.