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Israel's Attorney-General has been urged to launch a criminal investigation into a leading candidate to be the country's next Prime Minister as police have formally recommended that Ehud Olmert be indicted in a corruption investigation.
A leading Israeli law professor is pushing for a criminal investigation into whether Shaul Mofaz ordered "war crimes" to be committed when he was the military's chief of staff.
Justice officials are studying a three-page letter from David Kretzmer calling for the investigation into claims - highlighted by the Independent last month - that Mofaz ordered a daily "quota" of Palestinian deaths at a briefing to Army officers in May 2001, after the start of the second intifada.
Yesterday the Israeli police recommended to prosecutors that Prime Minister Olmert be indicted in a corruption investigation.
With Olmert committed to resigning after his Kadima party holds a leadership vote on September 17, the recommendation will have no immediate impact on his tenure and does not guarantee an indictment by the Attorney-General.
Police said they had evidence showing that Olmert illegally received money from a United States businessman and made duplicate claims for travel expenses while he previously served as Mayor of Jerusalem and Trade and Industry Minister.
He has denied any wrongdoing in a series of investigations.
A police statement said the recommendation included charges of bribery, fraud, money laundering and breach of public trust over funds that "reached hundreds of thousands of dollars".
Mofaz is the Deputy Prime Minister and the main rival to Tzipi Livni, the Foreign Minister, for Kadima's leadership.
Kretzmer, emeritus professor of international law at Hebrew University, says accounts of the briefing by Mofaz give rise "to a grave suspicion" that the then chief of staff "committed serious offences, some of which, at least, fall into the category of war crimes".
The letter to Menachem Mazuz, the Attorney-General, refers to a book by the Israeli journalists Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelah, Boomerang: The Failure of Leadership in the Second Intifada, which says that Mofaz, after ensuring that his remarks were not being officially recorded, called for a Palestinian death toll amounting to 70 a day.
The book says that while the call caused deep disquiet among some of Mofaz's most senior officers, one commander in the Hebron district explained the subsequent fatal shooting of a Palestinian policeman as being in accordance with Mofaz's exhortation.
Kretzmer, who also holds a post at the University of Ulster, said that an order to kill people "by quota" was "not consistent with the norms of humanitarian law" and that the test of proportionality was especially relevant in cases of military occupation in which even the actions of armed groups did not "relieve the Army of its obligations to residents of the territory".
The letter cites three reports in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2001 and 2002, which he says raise the suspicion that Mofaz ordered senior officers to shoot at every armed Palestinian, regardless of whether he posed a threat to Israeli forces or not.
It points out that at the start of hostilities in 2000, Palestinian police were armed by agreement with the Israeli Government, that the military had insisted the conflict was with armed groups threatening Israelis and not against the Palestinian Authority or people, and that the Geneva Convention prohibits the killing of persons not taking part in hostilities.
Kretzmer tells Mazuz that one of the lessons of the Israeli police's corruption inquiries into Olmert, who has said he will step down after a new Kadima leader is elected, is that it is best if candidates for high office are investigated before they reach it.
"Otherwise the public is liable to be exposed once more to the disgrace of having police officers arrive at the Prime Minister's official residence in order to interrogate him."
Pointing out that the Geneva Convention obliges every state and country to investigate grave breaches, he warned that if the Israeli authorities did not do so, "there is a fear that it may be carried out by the authorities of another country".
Kretzmer has been told that his letter has been passed to "relevant persons" in the Justice Ministry who would read it. A ministry spokesman said this did not mean any acceptance of a case against Mofaz or that an investigation would be launched. In 2002, during a visit by Mofaz to Britain, the British lawyer Imran Khan, representing a group of Palestinians, presented the Director of Public Prosecutions with a series of other war crime allegations against the former chief of staff - including targeted assassinations and home demolitions.
While Khan claimed the DPP had passed the file to Scotland Yard's "crimes against humanity" section, no action was taken before Mofaz left the country.
- INDEPENDENT
