Bomb find undermines Gaza claim

JERUSALEM - Doubts have been cast on the Israeli rebuttal of the Goldstone Report after it emerged that a bomb was defused last year at a Gaza flour mill that Israel had officially said did not come under air attack during last year's war.

The presence of a large part of the fractured Mark 82 bomb was reported to a demining team at the end of January last year and technicians were dispatched to defuse the 225kg device the next month.

The flour mill is the only one in Gaza, and the Goldstone Report, commissioned by the UN, said its destruction "was carried out for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population".

The discrepancy in accounts of what happened at the mill followed Israel's reprimanding of two officers. Israel said a brigadier-general and a colonel had "exceeded their authority in a manner that jeopardised the lives of others" by authorising the firing of shells into the area of the main UN compound in Gaza. The military denied a Haaretz report that the two had been reprimanded over the use of white phosphorus.

The Government is trying to decide whether to order an independent investigation into the Gaza offensive or face possible fresh moves for an external war crimes probe to be launched.

The case of the El Badr flour mill in northern Gaza was examined in detail in the 575-page report by South African judge Richard Goldstone. It said the mill had come under air as well as ground attack during Operation Cast Lead, which lasted for three weeks.

The official update of Israel's own investigations - sent to the UN on Saturday - says inquiries by the military's Advocate General had found the mill did come under ground attack, but that he "did not find any evidence to support the assertion that the mill was attacked from the air using precise munitions".

It said the Advocate General had "determined that the allegation was not supported in the [Goldstone] report itself, nor in the testimony to the Fact-Finding Mission by [the joint owner] Rashad Hamada, who had left the area prior to the incident in response to the IDF's early warnings".

But a UN technical team went to the flour mill on February 11 last year to take the fuse out of the front half of the bomb - the sort commonly carried by Israeli Air Force F16 aircraft - and disposed of the munition that same day. A technical source said the team had received the initial report of the bomb on January 25 last year.

The Israeli report to the UN says that from the beginning of the Gaza operation the immediate area of the flour mill was used as a defensive zone because of its "proximity to Hamas' stronghold in the Shati refugee camp".

It said that Hamas had fortified the area with tunnels, booby-trapped houses, and had deployed its forces to attack troops operating there.One IDF squad had been ambushed by five Hamas operatives in a booby-trapped house.

But while saying that the mill had come under fire during the engagements, Israel rejected the suggestion in the Goldstone Report that it had come under deliberate attack, and said photographic evidence of the building was not consistent with an air attack.

- INDEPENDENT