Israel in complete denial of it's abuses in Gaza.

It's hard to take Mark Regev seriously as he squirms around, ignoring what the UN report actually said, and continuing to insist that we should ignore the report because Ban Ki-moon rejected the report's call for a full and impartial investigation into the war. According to Regev this means that he is, "distancing himself from the report."

The board of inquiry, led by Ian Martin, a Briton who is a former head of Amnesty International and a former UN special envoy to East Timor and Nepal, had limited scope, looking only at cases of death, injury or damage involving UN property and staff. But its conclusions amount to a major challenge to Israel.

It found the Israeli military's actions "involved varying degrees of negligence or recklessness", and that the military took "inadequate" precautions towards UN premises. It said the deaths of civilians should be investigated under the rules of international humanitarian law.

Regev continues to insist that Israel fired at UN premises because Hamas were using these premises to "draw Israel's fire". Regev simply must know that the UN Report said no such thing and that the report said Israel's claims were "not true":

The most serious incident investigated took place on 6 January, near a UN boys' preparatory school in Jabaliya that was being used as a shelter for hundreds of Palestinians who had fled their homes to escape the fighting. The Israeli military had fired several 120mm mortar rounds in the "immediate vicinity" of the school, killing between 30 and 40 Palestinians, the inquiry found.

Although Israel at the time said Hamas had fired mortars from within the school, the inquiry found this as not true: there had been no firing from within the compound and there were no explosives in the school.

It held Israel responsible for the attack and said the deaths of civilians should be "assessed in accordance with ... international humanitarian law." It also called for a formal acknowledgement from Israel that its allegations about Palestinian militants being present in the school were untrue.

So the report is actually calling for prosecutions, but Ban Ki-Moon is balking at this, which Regev is taking as Moon "distancing himself" from the reports findings. This is simply not true as Ban Ki-Moon published his own summary and stands by the report. He simply lacks the willpower to pursue the prosecutions which the report demands.

And the report was similarly dismissive of other Israeli claims:

5 January An Israeli air strike hit the UN Asma elementary school in Gaza City, where hundreds more Palestinians were sheltering. The missile killed three young men who had been walking to the bathroom in the school compound. The inquiry found no weapons or ammunition were being stored in the school, and that the men had been going to the toilet and not taking part in military activity. The attack was "an egregious breach of the inviolability of the United Nations premises", the inquiry said, again holding Israel responsible for the deaths and damage.

Not that you would know any of this if you listened to Regev. His main defence now appears to be that you can't trust a word that comes out of Palestinian mouths.

And, in the end, confusing even himself with the sheer scale of the mendacity he was engaging in, he appears to deny that Israel even bombed the building:

Snow: "The warehouse was not burned down by your shelling, the people were not killed by your bombs, correct?"

Regev: "Correct, correct"

He gave some astonishingly bad interviews during the assault on Gaza, but this one was jaw dropping, even by Regev's abysmally low standards.

Tags: Israel, Gaza, United Nations, Report