The State Department on Tuesday said that it would oppose any multilateral efforts to act on the findings of a UN report detailing possible war crimes during the conflict in the Gaza Strip last year, in an apparent contradiction of an earlier stance it had taken when it publicly claimed to have concerns over Israel’s military operations.
“We challenge the very foundation upon which this report was written, and we don’t believe that there’s a call or a need for any further Security Council work on this,” John Kirby, a State Department spokesman, said.
“We do not support any further UN work on this report,” Kirby said.
The report, issued on Monday, was written in the wake of allegations that Israel targeted civilians and used disproportionate force in the parts of Gaza where Palestinian militants operated. The investigation concluded that 1,462 Palestinian civilians were killed in the attacks.
In August of last year, the State Department condemned Israeli strikes on a UN school in Rafah. It called the shelling “disgraceful” and said that the United States was “appalled” by the attack. “Israel must do more to meet its own standards and avoid civilian casualties,” Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said at that time.
Similar concerns were also expressed by international organizations and NGOs in the wake of the attack. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called the shelling “a moral outrage and a criminal act” and “unjustifiable.” Amnesty International called for an “urgent” independent investigation.
A subsequent report issued by the Israeli military earlier this month cleared Israel of any wrongdoing in their operations in Gaza. In spite of its earlier critical stance, the State Department at that time refused to say whether any of its concerns were addressed.
“I’m not going to offer a comment on the finding,” spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters earlier in June.
The contrast between the expressed grievances last year and the refusal to say anything about those concerns after the release of subsequent reports and investigations did not go unnoticed by reporters at the State Department.
“Here’s my problem,” one said on Tuesday, “is that you had these concerns at the time. The Israelis have looked into it and they have found nothing that they did wrong. You haven’t said whether you agree with that or disagree with that. And now you have a UN report that you don’t like the foundation, but it essentially says what you were thinking several months ago, that Israel may have done something wrong, it may not have done something wrong; yet you’re opposed to that,” the reporter said.
“And I don’t know what’s happened in between that leads you now to say – well, you’re not even saying that your concerns have been alleviated, so where are you? You just forgot about them or what?”
In reply, the spokesman reiterated that the department “made very clear what our issues were at the time about the use of force” and that it had an “ongoing dialogue with the government of Israel on all these sorts of matters.”
When pressed by a reporter to say whether or not Israeli attacks on at least 15 targets resulting in the deaths of mostly civilians were war crimes, the spokesman said nothing.
“I have no comment on that,” he said.
