Haartz.com
By Anshel Pfeffer and Danna Harman
A co-author of the Goldstone report on Operation Cast Lead claims that Hamas fired only two rockets at Israel prior to last winter's conflict, according to a new report published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
The center's head, Dr. Dore Gold, former ambassador to the United Nations and an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, revealed the report at a press conference on WednesdayAccording to Gold's report, compiled by Lt. Col. (res.) Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi, during all the Goldstone Commission's interviews with Palestinian civilians, neither Travers nor its other members asked the interviewees who said their houses had been blown up by the Israel Defense Forces whether they were members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or whether weapons had been stored in their homes. (The transcripts of the interviews have been posted on the UN Web site.)
When Travers interviewed two Palestinian psychologists, he asked them how Israeli soldiers could kill children in front of their parents as if it were a fact.
In an interview last week with the Middle East Monitor, Travers leveled harsh accusations at the Israel Defense Forces that do no appear in the Goldstone report. He said the IDF had used drones that could detect people inside of buildings by their body heat and did so in attacking houses in which dozens of Palestinian civilians had taken shelter. According to Travers, Israel had attacked the Gaza Strip although Hamas supposedly only fired two rockets at Israel in the month before the operation, and that Hamas had wanted to continue the cease-fire.
The institute's report notes that Travers ignored the fact that in three days alone during the month before the IDF campaign, Hamas had fired 32 rockets at Israel and that according to Hamas spokesmen, among them the organization's leader in Damascus, Khaled Meshal, Hamas had resolved to end the cease-fire.
In two other media interviews, Travers rejected any possibility that Hamas had been using Gaza Strip mosques to hide weapons, despite Israel's evidence to the contrary and the testimony of a British army officer who visited Gaza and found clear signs that a mosque had been used for this purpose. According to Travers, the claim about the weapons in mosques "reflects Western perceptions in some quarters that Islam is a violent religion."
The report by the Jerusalem think tank also includes quotes from an interview Travers gave in which he accused Israel of murdering many Irish soldiers who where members of the UNIFIL contingent in South Lebanon. When asked about the fact that there had been official disagreement in Britain with the findings of the Goldstone report, Travers said that "Britain's foreign policy interests in the Middle East seem to be influenced strongly by Jewish lobbyists."
Travers contradicted the Goldstone report itself in his remark that he found no indication that Palestinians testifying before the commission feared reprisals by Hamas if they reported on the group's activities.
The Goldstone report found that Israel had purposefully struck Palestinian civilian targets, infrastructure and sites where there had been no Hamas military activity. According to Dahoah-Halevi, who perused a great deal of material on the Hamas Web site, if the Goldstone Commission had examined that material, to which the institute had referred it, it would have found a great deal of evidence of Hamas activity at the sites in question.
Institute director Gold called on Judge Richard Goldstone, the commission chairman, to condemn Travers' remarks.
Asked by Haaretz in an e-mail to respond to the report, Travers said that he was "not in a position to respond" in time for the paper's deadline. He wrote that Mr. Dore Gold's accusations of anti-Semitism were "of course an old canard - designed to silence reasoned debate on Israeli issues and is heartily rejected."
