Report on Gaza war abuses will be released on schedule: UN

Inquiry chief William Schabas resigned on Monday after Israeli accusations of bias, but report will be ready by March.

JERUSALEM // The United Nations said on Tuesday that a report on abuses during Irael’s 50-day war in Gaza last summer will not be derailed by the resignation of the inquiry’s chairman.

William Schabas resigned on Monday after Israel complained of conflict of interest, saying that the Canadian international law expert had prepared a legal opinion for the Palestine Liberation Organisation in October 2012.

Despite the Israeli complains, the UN said the report would be produced by next month as scheduled, brushing aside a demand from Israel on Tuesday to shelve it.

In his resignation letter, Mr Schabas denied that he was in any way beholden to the PLO but said he was reluctantly stepping down to avoid the inquiry into the July-August conflict – commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council – being compromised in any away.

“Under the circumstances and with great regret, I believe the important work of the commission is best served if I resign with immediate effect,” he wrote.

Council president Joachim Ruecker accepted the resignation, saying that “in this way even an appearance of conflict of interest is avoided, thus preserving the integrity of the process,” spokesman Rolando Gomez said.

But Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu seized on Mr Schabas’s departure to demand the abandonment of the whole investigation, charging that the rights council was an “anti-Israel body”.

“After the resignation of the committee chairman who was biased against Israel, the report that was written at the behest of the UN Human Rights Council – an anti-Israel body, the decisions of which prove it has nothing to do with human rights – needs to be shelved,” Mr Netanyahu said.

“This is the same council that in 2014 made more decisions against Israel than against Iran, Syria and North Korea combined.”

Foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said Mr Schabas’s resignation would make little difference to the inquiry’s outcome.

“It won’t change the committee’s report’s conclusions, which were biased in advance in accordance with the body that formed the committee, whose sole purpose is attacking and harming Israel,” he said.

Israel has long had stormy relations with council.

In January 2012, it became the first country to refuse to attend a periodic review of its human rights record. And two months later, it cut all ties with the council over its plans to probe how Jewish settlements were harming Palestinian rights.

In November, it announced that it would not cooperate with Mr Schabas’s investigation because of the “obsessive hostility against Israel of this commission and the words of its president against Israel and its leaders”.

Mr Gomez said the commission, which is scheduled to present its findings to the council next month, was in “the final phase of collecting evidence” and could name a new chairman as early as Tuesday.

He said the council president had stressed “the need to remain focused on the substantive work of the commission in the interest of the victims and their families on both sides”.

The Gaza conflict ended with a truce between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian territory’s de facto rulers, on August 26 after the deaths of more than 2,140 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and 73 people on the Israeli side, mostly soldiers.

The rights council vowed in August that both Israel and Hamas would be “subjected to a thorough investigation.”

* Agence France-Presse, Reuters