Goldstone Report

Summary: In 2009, the United Nations Human Rights Council commissioned an investigation into alleged human rights violations committed during the Israeli invasion of Gaza in December 2008-January 2009. The commission was chaired by Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist who had previously served as a prosecutor of civil rights violations during conflicts following the breakup of Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The commission's findings were subsequently known as the Goldstone Report. The report criticized both the government of Israel and Hamas, the governing authority in the Gaza Strip, for violating human rights by targeting civilians. The report, issued in November 2009, listed more instances of Israeli violations than violations by Hamas. In April 2011, Goldstone wrote an essay in The Washington Post in which he expressed regret over the report that bore his name, saying, "if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a very different document."

What is the Goldstone Report? In 2009, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) assembled a fact-finding commission to investigate alleged human rights violations in Gaza during the Israeli invasion of December 2008-January 2009. In that invasion, more than a thousand Palestinians died (1,444 according to Hamas; 1,166 according to Israel), as did thirteen Israelis. Initially, the UN council asked South African jurist Richard Goldstone, a veteran of earlier inquiries into alleged human rights violations in the conflict following the breakup of Yugoslavia as well as in Rwanda, to investigate allegations that Israel had intentionally targeted civilians. Goldstone said he would head the inquiry only if he could also investigate the behavior of Hamas, which was blamed by Israel for years of rocket attacks on civilian targets inside southern Israel.

The UN inquiry was specifically tasked with addressing the question of whether either or both sides—the Israeli military and Hamas, the Palestinian party that governed Gaza—had violated international law by deliberately targeting civilians. Both sides denied having done so. The commission later reported that it investigated events between June 19, 2008, and July 31, 2009—roughly six months on either side of the Israeli invasion—as well as "the historical context of the events that led to the military operations in Gaza" (December 27, 2008-January 18, 2009). Its investigation included, for example, the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip preceding the invasion, as well as events in Gaza during the three-week Israeli shelling and invasion.

Members of the commission visited Gaza repeatedly, entering via Egypt since Israel denied permission for them to enter Gaza via Israel. Israel also refused to provide the commission with information. The commission issued its 575-page report in September 2009.

Conclusions. On balance, the Goldstone Report was highly critical of the Israeli military's actions during the invasion of Gaza. It cataloged a series of specific actions that caused civilian casualties or the destruction of civilian infrastructure and said that those incidents "indicate that the instruction given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population" (p. 16). It said, "the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of willful killings and willfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility."

The report was also critical of Israel's use of certain weapons and munitions, notably white phosphorous.

The report criticized what it described as the widespread destruction of the civilian infrastructure in Gaza, e.g., the Al Bader flour mill and coops housing 31,000 chickens that accounted for ten percent of Gaza's egg production. Such attacks, it said, comprised "unlawful and wanton destruction not justified by military necessity." and "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability."

The Goldstone Report was also critical of the treatment of civilians by Israeli soldiers, including instances of "arbitrary deprivation of liberty and violation of due process." It said that "from the facts gathered, the Mission finds that there were numerous violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law committed in the context of these detentions. Civilians, including women and children, were detained in degrading conditions, deprived of food, water and access to sanitary facilities, and exposed to the elements in January without any shelter. The men were handcuffed, blindfolded and repeatedly made to strip, sometimes naked, at different stages of their detention."

The Goldstone Report was also critical of Israeli actions on the West Bank, although its investigators were unable to visit the area.

Israel strongly denied that the government had intended to target civilians. In July 2010, the Israeli government said in a letter to the United Nations that as a result of its own investigations, it had indicted a number of officers and soldiers for their actions. These indictments included that of a staff sergeant accused of shooting a Palestinian civilian who was among a group of people carrying a white flag.

The Goldstone Report was also critical of Hamas for a campaign of firing rockets that hit civilian areas of Israel—about 8,000 rockets since 2001, it said. In the six months before the Israeli invasion of Gaza, rockets fired from Gaza killed three civilians inside Israel and injured more than 1,000; houses, schools, cars, and at least one synagogue were also damaged. The report said: "The Mission has determined that the rockets and, to a lesser extent, mortars, fired by the Palestinian armed groups are incapable of being directed towards specific military objectives and were fired into areas where civilian populations are based" and "these attacks constitute indiscriminate attacks upon the civilian population of southern Israel (and) a deliberate attack against a civilian population" that "would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity" (p. 32). The report said "the Mission finds that there is significant evidence to suggest that one of the primary purposes of the rocket and mortar attacks is to spread terror amongst the Israeli civilian population, a violation of international law" (p. 33).

Members of the Commission:

• Richard Goldstone, a former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former prosecutor for two international criminal tribunals—one for the former Yugoslavia and the other for Rwanda—was chair of the committee. Its report is familiarly referred to as the Goldstone Report.
• Christine Chinkin, professor of International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science and former member of a fact-finding mission to Beit Hanoun, a town in the Gaza Strip where eighteen civilians died under Israeli missile fire in 2006.
• Hina Jilani, advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and former member of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur (2004).
• Desmond Travers, a former colonel of the Irish military and a board member of the Institute for International Criminal Investigations.

Implications and Consequences. In October 2009, the Human Rights Council, meeting in Geneva, endorsed the Goldstone Report by a vote of twenty-five to six, with eleven abstentions and five not voting. (The votes against came from the United States and five European states. Britain and France did not vote.) The vote came despite requests by the United States and Israel to delay the report on grounds that it could jeopardize re-starting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

In November 2009, the UN General Assembly voted 114-118, with forty-four abstentions, to endorse the Goldstone Report. The US voted against the endorsement; Britain, France, and Russia were among the countries that abstained.

The Human Rights Council also threatened to press for action by the Security Council or the International Criminal Court if both Israel and Hamas failed to carry out their own internal investigations. (Technically, the Palestinian side was represented by the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, which exercised no influence over Hamas in Gaza, although Hamas said it would conduct its own investigation.)

Follow-Up. The opposition to the report by the United States and the decision of two other Security Council members, Britain and France, not to vote on the report meant that the Goldstone Report did not lead to any concrete actions against either Israel or Hamas. In early 2011, however, Goldstone said he regretted that the report may have been inaccurate. "If I had known then what I know now," he wrote, "the Goldstone Report would have been a very different document."

Goldstone noted that Israel had conducted investigations into over 400 alleged incidents of misconduct, whereas Hamas had conducted none. Israeli investigations subsequent to the release of Goldstone Report findings indicated that "civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy."

Goldstone wrote that "hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel. That comparatively few Israelis have been killed by the unlawful rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in no way minimizes the criminality. The UN Human Rights Council should condemn these heinous acts in the strongest terms."

Bibliography

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Farer, Tom. (2010). The Goldstone Report on the Gaza conflict: An Agora. Global Governance. http://ehis.ebscohost.com/ehost/viewarticle?data=dGJyMPPp44rp2%2FdV0%2Bnjisfk5Ie46vB55dvwjKzj34HspOOA7enyWLKlr0mtqK5Jr5axUrOuuEq0ls5lpOrweezp33vy3%2B2G59q7S7Spskq3rbNRpOLfhuWz44ak2uBV8unmPvLX5VW%2FxKR57LOzSbCuskizqqR%2B7ejrefKz5I3q4vJ99uoA&hid=101

Goldstone, Richard. (2009, Apr. 1). Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes. Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-report-on-israel-and-war-crimes/2011/04/01/AFg111JC%5Fstory.html

United Nations. (2021). Goldstone report – General Assembly debate – verbatim record. Retrieved Sept. 28, 2023, from https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180360

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