Jerusalem: Israel was to give UN chief Ban Ki-moon a letter on Friday in response to a UN demand that it probe alleged war crimes in its Gaza offensive which the Jewish state previously rejected, officials said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was putting the finishing touches to a 40-page letter to be delivered to Ban's office on Friday evening, a government official said, asking not to be named.
Information Minister Yuli Edelstein said earlier in the week that Israel rejected the demand for a "verification commission”.
But Israeli media have said the government may agree to a limited probe to deflect some of the criticism over the three-week offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis just over a year ago.
The investigators would examine decisions and orders given by government officials and military top brass and would interview only senior officials, the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot said on Friday.
The UN General Assembly called on Israel and Hamas in November to conduct independent investigations and endorsed the Goldstone report, a UN probe into the war that accused both sides of war crimes.
Both Israel and Hamas have rejected claims their forces may have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity.
Edelstein this week dismissed the report as "anti-Semitic”, even though its main author, South African international war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone, is Jewish.
Military investigators said they found no evidence that any soldier deliberately attacked civilians during the Gaza war and stressed that the civilian casualties were accidents caused by the chaos of the war Israel launched in response to Palestinian rocket attacks.
But leading Israeli human rights groups have urged Israel to agree to the UN request and "establish, without delay, an independent and impartial investigation."
The Hamas rulers of Gaza for their part claimed this week that their investigations showed that Palestinian fighters in the coastal strip did not target Israeli civilians during the war, a claim rejected by Human Rights Watch.
"Hamas’ claim that rockets were intended to hit Israeli military targets and only accidentally harmed civilians is belied by the facts," the New York-based group said.
The 575-page Goldstone report recommended its conclusions be referred to the International Criminal Court prosecutor in The Hague if Israel and Hamas fail to carry out credible investigations.
Bureau Report
First Published: Friday, January 29, 2010, 16:39