Israel expected to cooperate with UN inquiry into flotilla raid despite criticism
26 July 2010
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has strongly criticized the members of a ‘fact-finding’ team named by the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate the flotilla raid. The names of the three experts on war crimes and human rights were announced last Friday. They are Sir Desmond de Silva of Britain, a former chief war crimes prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone; Karl Hudson-Phillips of Trinidad and Tobago, a former judge at the International Criminal Court; and Mary Shanthi Dairiam of Malaysia, a women's rights activist. At a Cabinet meeting on Sunday Netanyahu called the team "similar to the Goldstone committee with unsympathetic trends, to say the least."
However, on Monday, media reported that Israel would cooperate with the UN inquiry, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak was expected to give qualified approval to the investigation at a meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York this week. The concession is being viewed as a reluctant trade-off by the Israeli government, which rejected a separate attempt to launch an inquiry into the flotilla incident by the UN Human Rights Council.
The three-member team is set to gather information in Israel, Turkey and the Gaza Strip. It is scheduled to report back to the council during its session that opens on 12 September. Israel established an independent public commission, which includes two international observers, to investigate the incident, in which nine Turkish activists were killed.
On Sunday, the Cabinet approved the appointment of two other members to serve on the Turkel Comission at the request of the commission's chairman, the retired Supreme Court Justice Jacob Turkel. An Israeli military inquiry earlier this month determined that intelligence and operational errors had happened during the raid.
The UN investigation was mandated by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council in June at the request of Islamic member countries.
» Spanish flotilla activists sue Israeli government
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World Jewish Congress Secretary General Dan Diker speaks on the upcoming debate at the United Nations about the unilateral declaration of statehood by the Palestinians.
