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"By refusing to cooperate with the Mission, the Government of Israel prevented it from meeting Israeli government officials, but also from traveling to Israel to meet with Israeli victims and to the West Bank to meet with Palestinian Authority representatives and Palestinian victims."
Commission's Findings
A UN September 15 press release stated that the Mission concluded that "there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity." Examples included numerous incidents of civilians shot waving white flags while trying to leave their homes for safer locations. Other instances of Palestinians used as human shields, arbitrary arrests, and extra-judicial assassinations in Gaza and the West Bank.
In particular, the Commission noted that:
"While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right of self defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole." Rocket attacks were a pretext for naked aggression.
Calling them war crimes, the Mission found evidence that "Palestinian armed groups" launched rockets and mortars into Southern Israel, but they were minor incidents compared to the Israeli onslaught.
The Commission called the Gaza siege collective punishment through a "policy of progressive isolation and deprivation," and that Operation Cast Lead destroyed vast amounts of Gaza infrastructure, homes, public buildings, factories, schools, hospitals, police stations, and other structures and facilities.
It cited the death toll at over 1,400, families still living in rubble, the blockade preventing reconstruction, and significant immediate and long-term trauma, especially on children.
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