The Report of the Fact-Finding Mission established pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution S-9/1 was instigated as part of a political campaign, and itself represents a political assault directed against Israel and against every State forced to confront terrorist threats.

In the eyes of the authors of the Report, Israel's operation in Gaza had nothing to do with the 12,000 rockets and mortars fired by Hamas over eight years on towns and villages inside Israel, nor with the fact that close to one million Israeli citizens had to live their lives within seconds of bomb-shelters because they were in range of Hamas attacks. Nor, in their view, did it have anything to do with the smuggling of weapons and ammunition to terrorist groups through hundreds of tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border. Indeed, neither the right to self defense nor the smuggling of weapons into the Gaza Strip are even mentioned in the Report.

Rather, the Report advances a narrative which ignores the threats to Israeli civilians, as well as Israel's extensive diplomatic and political efforts to avoid the outbreak of hostilities. In this narrative self defense finds no place – Israel's defensive operation was nothing other than a "deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population" (1690(2) ).

In support of this vicious and unfounded assertion, the Report has no qualms about bending both facts and law. In the spirit of the one-sided mandate it was given by the HRC resolution, and the clearly stated political prejudices of some of its Members, of the Mission carefully selected its witnesses and the incidents it chose to investigate for clearly political ends. Yet even within this self-selected body of evidence, the Report engages in creative editing, misrepresentations of facts and law, and repeatedly adopts evidentiary double standards, attributing credibility to every anti-Israel allegation, and invariably dismissing evidence that indicates any wrongdoing by Hamas.

The Report repeatedly downplays or ignores the reality of terrorist threats, and the complexity of the military challenges in urban warfare. It also goes far beyond its mandate as a fact-finding mission, making legal and judicial determinations of criminal wrongdoing, even in the absence of crucial information.

The Report dismisses the Israeli legal system and its extensive investigation process of allegations of misconduct by Israeli armed forces. In so doing, the Report effectively calls into question the internal investigation procedures of the armed forces of most democratic states since Israel's system is similar to, and in many cases more stringent than, those of many other countries.

The Report's recommendations are fully in line with its one-sided agenda and seek to harness the Security Council, the General Assembly the International Criminal Court, the Human Rights Council, and the entire international community in its political campaign against Israel.

Israel is committed to studying every report, from whatever body, on the conduct of its forces, and to fully examining every allegation of wrongdoing. However, the agenda and tone of this Report clearly undermines the role it might have played in any genuine dialogue about the complex challenges faced in the Gaza operation. 

The initial comments set out in this paper are not a comprehensive account of the errors and distortions in the Report. Rather these comments identify some of the most troubling tendencies and implications of the Report and the process that produced it, both for Israel and for any nation involved in armed conflict with terrorist organizations, under the following headings:.

• The Mandate of the Mission
• The Composition and Conduct of the Mission
• Selection of Incidents
• Evidentiary double standards
• Misrepresentations of law and fact
• Simplistic approaches to complex military challenges
• Minimizing terrorist threats – and vindicating terrorist tactics
• Legal and Pseudo-legal findings
• Dismissal of national investigations and legal systems
• One-Sided Recommendations