United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict

The United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, also known as the Goldstone Report, was a United Nations fact-finding mission established in April 2009 pursuant to Resolution A/HRC/RES/S-9/1 of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) of 12 January 2009, following the Gaza War as an independent international fact-finding mission "to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying Power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression".^[1][2] South African jurist Richard Goldstone was appointed to head the mission.^[2][3] The other co-authors of the Report were Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers.

Israel refused to cooperate with the investigation, claiming anti-Israel bias in the UNHRC.

The Goldstone Report accused both the Israel Defense Forces and the Palestinian militants of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. It recommended that each side openly investigate its own conduct, and to bring the allegations to the International Criminal Court if they failed to do so.^[4][5] The government of Israel rejected the report as prejudiced and full of errors, and also sharply rejected the charge that it had a policy of deliberately targeting civilians.^[6] The militant Islamic group Hamas initially rejected some of the report's findings,^[7] but then urged world powers to embrace it.^[8] Goldstone stated that the mission "wasn't an investigation, it was a fact-finding mission" and that the conclusion that war crimes had been committed "was always intended as conditional". He described the allegations as "a useful road map" for independent investigations by Israel and the Palestinians.^[9] He later added that the mission did not conduct a judicial investigation, and stated that its findings did not amount to "the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt". He described it as a prima facie case, "reasonable on weighing the evidence" and said that the information obtained would not be admissible as evidence in a criminal court.^[10]

The report received wide support among countries in the United Nations, while Western countries were split between supporters and opponents of the resolutions endorsing the report.^{[11][12][13][14]} Critics of the report stated that it contained methodological failings, legal and factual errors, and falsehoods, and devoted insufficient attention to the allegations that Hamas was deliberately operating in heavily populated areas of Gaza.^[15][16]

The Report described the three weeks comprising the Gaza War as

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.^[4]

On 1 April 2011, Goldstone stated that recent Israeli investigations indicate that it was not Israeli government policy to deliberately target citizens, saying "While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee's report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy."^[17] On 14 April 2011 the three other co-authors of the Report, Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers, released a joint statement criticizing Goldstone's recantation of this aspect of the report. They all agreed that the report was valid and that Israel and Hamas had failed to investigate alleged war crimes satisfactorily.^[18][19]