Netanyahu vows long fight against UN report 

(MENAFN - Jordan Times) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised a lengthy diplomatic battle to "delegitimise" United Nations charges that Israel committed war crimes in the Gaza Strip, an official said on Saturday.

The UN Human Rights Council singled out Israel for censure in a resolution on Friday, while endorsing a report by South African jurist Richard Goldstone which condemned both Israeli and Hamas actions in a war last December and January.

Netanyahu, who has said the Goldstone report could undermine US-sponsored Middle East peace moves and that he would object to Israelis standing trial for war crimes, was quoted as saying Israel would wage a protracted struggle against the criticism.

"Israel must delegitimise the delegitimisation," Netanyahu said, according to an Israeli official. He said the campaign "would not take just a week or two but possibly years".

Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said on Friday that "Israel totally and completely" rejected the UN council's vote condemning Israel but not the Palestinian Islamist faction.

However, Ayalon added that he thought Israel would not ultimately suffer any significant consequences.

Twenty-five states including China and Russia endorsed the resolution passed by the council meeting in Geneva, while six including the United States voted against, charging that the resolution was one-sided. Eleven states abstained. Four, including France and Britain, did not vote at all.

The resolution endorsed Goldstone's recommendation that the war crimes issue be referred to the UN Security Council if the sides failed to conduct credible domestic investigations within six months, and possibly then to the International Criminal Court.

It did not mention Hamas, which Goldstone also criticised for its actions in the Gaza war. Palestinians say that more than 1,400 Palestinians died, among them many civilians, while 13 Israelis were killed.

Palestinians have said they would name committees to see to implementation of Goldstone's recommendations. Hamas said on Friday it would investigate, but did not comment on the report's criticism of the Islamist group.

Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would also see to forming a panel to implement the report "so it does not end up lying on a shelf like other resolutions do", said an aide, Yasser Abed Rabbo, in the West Bank.

Palestinian unity deal

Hamas was due to hand its response on Sunday to Egyptians mediating a Palestinian unity deal, a spokesman for the Islamist movement said on Saturday without disclosing its position.

A Hamas delegation is to travel to Cairo to deliver the response, Fawzi Barhoum told AFP, while refusing to say whether the movement would accept the proposal.

The response "will be taken within a framework aimed at guaranteeing the success of the Egyptian efforts" to heal the deep rift between Hamas and the secular Fateh movement, Barhoum said.

On Friday, Cairo announced that its mediators had delayed to an unspecified date their deadline for Hamas to sign the unity deal at the Islamists' request.

That came a day after Abbas' Fateh Party presented a signed copy of the deal, which marks Cairo's latest bid to unite the bitter rivals.

On Saturday, Abbas said he would announce the date for the Palestinian elections on October 25.

The embattled Palestinian president said earlier last week that if the two factions did not reach agreement he would call for elections on January 24 instead of the June 28 date in the Cairo plan.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a key adviser to Abbas, warned that the Palestinian Authority would reject any new Hamas "condition, reservation or amendment" to the accord.

In that case, "we would have no choice but to go back to elections," he told a press conference in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Palestinian Basic Law mandates that a new general election be called at least three months before the end of the sitting parliament's mandate, a deadline which falls on October 25.

Abbas' four-year term expired as president in last January, but Fateh has cited provisions in the constitution that require presidential and parliamentary elections to be held together to justify his remaining in office.

Cairo has struggled for months to get Fateh and Hamas - which controls the Gaza Strip - to sign a national unity deal, but the two main Palestinian factions have repeatedly postponed the signing.

Egypt announced last week that the rival factions would sign the much delayed unity deal in Cairo on October 25-26, but Hamas asked for a delay amid controversy over the Goldstone report.