WASHINGTON (JTA) — Top Democratic and Republican foreign affairs leaders in the U.S. Congress are calling on the Obama administration to quash the Goldstone report.
A non-binding resolution introduced last Friday by U.S. Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the committee’s ranking Republican, "calls on the President and the Secretary of State to strongly and unequivocally oppose any further consideration of the ‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ and any other measures stemming from this report in multilateral fora."
Also signing on as sponsors were the Middle East subcommittee’s chairman and ranking member, Reps. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) and Dan Burton (R-Ind.).
The report, by a fact-finding mission led by human rights prosecutor Richard Goldstone, alleges Israel and Hamas committed war crimes in last winter’s Gaza war. The Obama administration has called the report flawed, but also says it raises allegations that deserve to be addressed by the parties to the conflict.
The administration is opposed to furthering the report in international committees but has stopped short of unequivocally blocking such consideration.
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