Netanyahu says Israel already investigating some Goldstone allegations

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country had already investigated 26 accusations contained in the controversial Goldstone report, "because we are a democratic country." In an interview with the ‘Washington Post’, Netanyahu said Israel was looking into setting up an independent inquiry not because of Goldstone, "but because of our own internal needs."

"We have investigated people for wrong behavior. We have put people on trial in the past because we are a functioning democracy. We will do it in this case, too. But what the Goldstone report actually accuses Israel of is deliberately targeting civilians, which is patently false," the prime minister told the newspaper. Following the publication of the interview, the Prime Minister's Office put out a clarification of Netanyahu's remarks regarding the establishment of an independent commission of inquiry. "The flow of the interview makes it clear that Prime Minister Netanyahu intended to say that Israel is already examining the events according to existing internal procedures, not that it is 'considering' investigating the course of events themselves by other means," it said. The newspaper ‘Haaretz’ reported that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak had decided to appoint a small task force to advise how best to react to the Goldstone report.

In the interview, Netanyahu also called for changing the international laws of war to adapt to global terrorism. "The best way to defuse this issue is to speak the truth because Israel was defending itself with just means against an unjust attack," he said. "Serious countries have to think about adapting the laws of war in the age of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. If the terrorists believe they have a license to kill by choosing to kill from behind civilian lines, that's what they'll do it again and again. What exactly is Israel supposed to do?"

Meanwhile, senior Democratic and Republican leaders in the US Congress are calling on the Obama administration to quash the Goldstone report. A non-binding bi-partisan resolution introduced last week by Howard Berman, the chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, and Ileana Ross-Lehtinen, the committee's ranking Republican, "calls on the President and the Secretary of State to strongly and unequivocally oppose any further consideration of the [Goldstone report] and any other measures stemming from this report in multilateral fora."