(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Israel's military said it had opened eight new criminal investigations into its Gaza war operations, including cases involving the deaths of 30 Palestinians.
The internal inquiries could help Israel challenge the work of a UN Human Rights Council commission of inquiry into possible war crimes committed by its forces and Palestinian militants in the 50-day conflict in July and August. Israel has said it would not cooperate with the panel, accusing it of bias.
More than 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed in the fighting, according to the Gaza health ministry. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel were killed.
The military said late on Saturday that it would investigate a July 20 air strike on the Abu Jama family home in the town of Khan Younis in which 27 Palestinians were killed. Human rights groups said the dead were civilians. The new probes will also examine the deaths of two Palestinian ambulance drivers on July 25 in Israeli strikes and a July 29 incident in which, according to a rights group, a Palestinian carrying a white flag was killed.
Four other inquiries will look into looting allegations.
In September, the military opened five criminal investigations into its Gaza war operations, including attacks that killed four Palestinian children on a beach and 17 people at a UN school. About 85 incidents are under various stages of legal review by the military.
Israel has said Hamas bears ultimate responsibility for civilian casualties because the group's fighters operated in crowded neighbourhoods.
Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said the new Israeli investigations were aimed at circumventing the UN inquiry. He called for "independent probes to bring Israeli war criminals to justice". Israel launched its Gaza offensive on July 8 with the declared aim of halting cross-border rocket salvoes by Hamas, an Islamist movement considered a terrorist organisation by the West. The fighting was ended by an Egyptian-brokered truce.
Late on Saturday, the Israeli navy detained for questioning 12 Palestinian fishermen on five boats that strayed from an Israeli-designated fishing zone off Gaza, the military said. It was the largest such group taken into custody since the ceasefire went into effect.
Nezar Ayyash, head of the Gaza fishermen's union, denied the 10km maritime limit was breached. In past incidents, fishermen have been released shortly after being detained.
Meanwhile, six Palestinians were charged in an Israeli court yesterday of digging illegally for antiquities in a remote desert region where archaeologists believe undiscovered Dead Sea Scrolls are buried, Israel's Antiquities Authority said.
The arrests came after a yearlong operation to stop looting in the Judean Desert, thought to be the source of scroll fragments which have recently trickled onto the local antiquities market, said Uzi Rotstein, an Israeli antiquities inspector.
Rotstein said he spotted the alleged antiquities looters by chance in late November He was in the desert training as a volunteer in a hiker rescue squad when he took a photograph of a far-off cave on the side of a cliff and noticed two men standing by it. "No one has any business being there on a Saturday morning," said Rotstein.
He said the suspects climbed down a steep 70-metre descent to reach what is known to archaeologists as the previously excavated Cave of the Skulls, destroying archaeological strata in the cave dating back 5,000 years.
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