Israel ‘Enraged’ by UN Gaza Report

Report Critical of Attacks on UN Facilities, Calls for Reparations

The Israeli Foreign Ministry is reportedly “enraged” tonight, after the United Nations released a report regarding its attacks on UN facilities in the Gaza Strip during this year’s war. The inquiry accused Israel of “gross negligence and recklessness” in the attacks.

The most high profile attack in perhaps the entire war, which killed nearly 1,000 Palestinian civilians, was when Israeli mortars attacked the UN’s al-Fahoura school in the Jabalya refugee camp. Israel initially claimed that the facility was being used by Hamas, but changed their story several times in the days that followed, but never really settled on any single official story. At this point, the official line appears to be simply that criticizing the attack is inherently biased.

Israel had previously declined to cooperate with the United Nations on any Gaza probes, and said it would not allow a delegation of investigators to even enter the country. The Israeli military briefly had a probe of their own, but abandoned it insisting that all the evidence of civilian deaths in the war was “based on hearsay.”

The Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip was cheered at the time by the United States Congress, and many of the weapons used by the Israeli military in the war were provided by the US. Indeed, one of Israel’s official explanations for the attack on the UN school blamed a faulty US-supplied smart bomb. State Department spokesman Robert Wood cautioned against “politicization” of the report’s findings.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.