ﮎﮎ Zionist Concentration Camp

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Imprisoned on the sliver of land that is Gaza



The deaths on the flotilla bringing aid to Gaza has turned
the spotlight on the plight of the 1.4 million trapped in
its borders, writes former UN official David Shearer.

The Dominion Post | 7:53AM - Thursday, 03 June 2010



I SPENT spent more than four years arguing, shouting, pleading with Israel to open Gaza's borders — documenting the aid that finally made it through, or just as often, what didn't. As a United Nations official I came and went from Gaza, unable to imagine what it must be like to be imprisoned in my own home.

Hamada, a Gazan staff member who worked with me, would quietly plead to help him and his family leave. We tried, but all appeals to the Israelis were turned down. He would tell me of his two small sons clinging to him when there was shooting or planes flying overhead, wetting their beds in fear and crying to him to make it stop.

We still stay in touch. I left there in 2007. He's still in Gaza, still desperate to leave like so many others, but still loyally doing his job. Now nine people have died and another 45 have been injured after Israeli commandos stormed boats in international waters carrying relief supplies for the 1.4 million people in Gaza.

The Israeli response has been condemned around the world, including in the UN Security Council. In New Zealand, Foreign Minister Murray McCully has expressed his grave concern and said an internal Israeli inquiry won't be good enough.

The incident is tragic but it has highlighted an even bigger tragedy: the plight of thousands of Palestinian families living in that tiny sliver of land, Gaza.

Gaza was once described by a former British ambassador to Israel as the largest detention centre in the world.

Surrounding Gaza is a double barbed-wire fence. Anyone approaching within 200 metres of the fence is shot. To sea there is an Israeli naval blockade.

Gazans have resorted to digging ‘illegal’ tunnels under their southern border to Egypt. Supplies are dragged through, supplementing the humanitarian rations the population receives through Israel's checkpoints. There is little business, no exports, massive unemployment and families depend on aid.

This is the situation that the Free Gaza flotilla was trying to alleviate and draw attention to. They have succeeded beyond their imagination but at the cost of their own lives.

Since 2006, when it won the Palestinian elections, Hamas has governed Gaza. Israel believes Hamas is a terrorist organisation. It refused to deal with them and closed its borders severely restricting any Palestinian movement in or out.

This standoff has been violent. Hamas and a variety of other Palestinian organisations sporadically fire homemade rockets into nearby Israeli towns from Gaza. The Israelis fire artillery shells and launch bombing raids into Gaza Strip. It was destined to end badly. But for Israel, the boarding of the humanitarian ships is the latest in a series of incidents that is increasingly redefining Israel's image in the world.

It will, of course, protest its innocence, that it was fired on first, that the humanitarian activists were terrorist sympathisers. Whatever the case, that won't be the impression left with the great majority.



IT FOLLOWS follows the murder of a Hamas leader in Dubai by Israelis using forged passports last January.

Fresh too is Israel's early 2009 attack on Gaza in its attempt to stop the continuous firing of homemade rockets. More than 1300 Palestinians in Gaza were killed - more than a quarter of them children. Thirteen Israelis died in the operation (four from friendly fire).

The image of Israel as a beleaguered tiny nation threatened by its Arab neighbours has vanished. Now it is the superpower of the region.

Israel's GDP is bigger than all of the surrounding Arab countries combined. Its American-supplied weaponry vastly superior to any neighbour. And Israel possesses the ultimate fallback, nuclear weapons. It is all powerful. The threat to it comes from within, not from the outside.

Yet it's difficult to know where Israel is heading strategically or what it really believes is the answer to its own future.

Locking the people of Gaza up behind barbed wire has done nothing for its image, nor has it stopped the homemade rockets being fired on nearby Israeli towns from a variety of militant groups inside Gaza.

The situation has got worse, fuelled by anger, frustration and an attitude of ‘what have we got to lose?’

Meanwhile, in the other area Israel occupies, the West Bank, the 2.4 million Palestinians living there are being pushed off their land by Israeli settlers wanting to settle there.

The settlements are illegal under international law, but that hasn't stopped 500,000 Israelis moving in.

It is, of course, a recipe for more violence. It will inevitably come and it will fuel the extremists on all sides — at the expense of the peacemakers.

The answers are there, but the starting point is a respect for basic human rights. That, I think, is what the humanitarian flotilla was trying to point out.

• David Shearer headed the UN office that coordinated the relief effort to Gaza and the West Bank between 2003 and 2007.

www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/opinion/3770512/Imprisoned-on-the-sliver-of-land-that-is-Gaza

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From Haaretz.com Israeli News...

A Special Place in Hell
The Second Gaza War: Israel lost at sea

We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege, which is itself becoming Israel's Vietnam.

By BRADLEY BURSTON | 12:24hrs - Monday, 31 May 2010

A war tells a people terrible truths about itself. That is why it is so difficult to listen.

We were determined to avoid an honest look at the first Gaza war. Now, in international waters and having opened fire on an international group of humanitarian aid workers and activists, we are fighting and losing the second. For Israel, in the end, this Second Gaza War could be far more costly and painful than the first.

In going to war in Gaza in late 2008, Israeli military and political leaders hoped to teach Hamas a lesson. They succeeded. Hamas learned that the best way to fight Israel is to let Israel do what it has begun to do naturally: bluster, blunder, stonewall, and fume.

Hamas, and no less, Iran and Hezbollah, learned early on that Israel's own embargo against Hamas-ruled Gaza was the most sophisticated and powerful weapon they could have deployed against the Jewish state.

Here in Israel, we have still yet to learn the lesson: We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege. The siege itself is becoming Israel's Vietnam.

Of course, we knew this could happen. On Sunday, when the army spokesman began speaking of a Gaza-bound aid flotilla in terms of an attack on Israel, MK Nahman Shai, the IDF chief spokesman during the 1991 Gulf war, spoke publicly of his worst nightmare, an operation in which Israeli troops, raiding the flotilla, might open fire on peace activists, aid workers and Nobel laureates.

Likud MK Miri Regev, who also once headed the IDF Spokesman's Office, said early Monday that the most important thing now was to deal with the negative media reports quickly, so they would go away.

But they are not going to go away. One of the ships is named for Rachel Corrie, killed while trying to bar the way of an IDF bulldozer in Gaza seven years ago. Her name, and her story, have since become a lightning rod for pro-Palestinian activism.

Perhaps most ominously, in a stepwise, lemming-like march of folly in our relations with Ankara, a regional power of crucial importance and one which, if heeded, could have helped head off the First Gaza War, we have come dangerously close to effectively declaring a state of war with Turkey.

"This is going to be a very large incident, certainly with the Turks," said Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the cabinet minister with the most sensitive sense of Israel's ties with the Muslim world.

We explain, time and again, that we are not at war with the people of Gaza. We say it time and again because we ourselves need to believe it, and because, deep down, we do not.

There was a time, when it could be said that we knew ourselves only in wartime. No longer. Now we know nothing. Yet another problem with refraining from talks with Hamas and Iran: They know us so much better than we know ourselves.

They know, as the song about the Lebanon War suggested ("Lo Yachol La'atzor Et Zeh") that we, unable to see ourselves in any clarity, are no longer capable of stopping ourselves.

Hamas, as well as Iran, have come to know and benefit from the toxicity of Israeli domestic politics, which is all too ready to mortgage the future for the sake of a momentary apparent calm.

They know that in our desperation to protect our own image of ourselves, we will avoid modifying policies which have literally brought aid and comfort to our enemies, in particular Hamas, which the siege on Gaza has enriched through tunnel taxes and entrenched through anger toward Israel.

For many on the right, it must be said, there will be a quiet joy in all of what is about to hit the fan. "We told you so," the crowing will begin. "The world hates us, no matter what we do. So we may as well go on building [Read: ‘Settling the West Bank and East Jerusalem’] and defending our borders [Read: ‘Bolster Hamas and ultimately harm ourselves by refusing to lift the Gaza embargo’]."

Hamas, Iran and the Israeli and Diaspora hard right know, as one, that this is a test of enormous importance for Benjamin Netanyahu. Keen to have the world focus on Iran and the threat it poses to the people of Israel, Netanyahu must recognize that the world is now focused on Israel and the threat it poses to the people of Gaza.

www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/a-special-place-in-hell-the-second-gaza-war-israel-lost-at-sea-1.293246

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From Haaretz.com Israeli News...

Strenger than Fiction: Israel's bunker mentality

Israel is stuck in the belief that it is right, and everybody else is wrong and hence incapable of admitting that its policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians has been disastrous.

By CARLO STRENGER | 15:50hrs - Wednesday, 02 June, 2010

There are two profound psychological blocks that do not allow Israel’s leadership to get off its disastrous course, once again proven by the Gaza flotilla disaster: one is sheer fear, the other is self-righteousness.

Israel has real enemies like Iran and Hezbollah. Human psychology is such that fear often leads to freezing and hanging on to the same course of action, even if it proves disastrous time and again. As a result Israel doesn’t listen to criticism — either from inside or from outside.

This inability to listen is reinforced by self-righteousness: Israel is stuck in the belief that it is right, and everybody else is wrong and hence incapable of admitting that Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians has been disastrous; that Israel should have engaged with the Arab League peace initiative years ago, and that a U turn needs to be made. Admitting that one has been wrong is always difficult; but Israel’s need for self-righteousness makes it even more difficult.

Israel fails to see the difference between its friends that care, but criticize Israel for its wrongheadedness and those who hate Israel and want its demise. Time and again Europeans who care for Israel tell me ‘we want to support you; we want Israel to be a thriving country. We are in favor of the Zionist dream. But please tell us: why is your government so intent to harm Israel? Why does it drive away its friends? Why can’t it listen to our advice? Is there anything we can do or say that will reach the hearts and minds of your leaders?’

This exasperation has been expressed publicly by French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, one of Israel’s staunchest friends, who has been taking on Israel’s critics from the European extreme left with force and courage for years. He writes that the state of mind of Israel’s leadership that says ‘the world doesn’t understand us’ and ‘damn if we do and damn if we don’t, so we’ll just do what we want’ has reached the level of what he calls political autism.

When asked what could turn around Israel’s leadership I am at a loss for an answer, because Israel doesn’t even listen to critics from the inside. Some reacted to the Flotilla debacle emotionally. David Grossman wrote a moving piece in which he speaks of the shame he feels about Israel’s actions. He expresses his pain about how far Israel has declined.

Others wrote in a more analytical vein. Amos Oz in a judicious op-ed in the New York Times speaks of the importance of realizing the limits of force; that Israel must start understanding that there is no way to defeat Hamas by military means, and that Israel can stop the current deterioration only by moving quickly towards a peace agreement with Fatah about a Palestinians state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

But Israel’s leadership has gone into a bunker mentality. Like a city besieged in the times before telecommunications, nothing reaches its hearts and minds. To the extent they will even read Grossman, Oz, Levy and countless others, the reaction will be "all these pundits and intellectuals; what do they know about the world! We need to stick to our inner truth; we know what’s right for Israel. We don’t need the usual gibberish of intellectuals; soft-hearted, unrealistic people who don’t have a clue about how the real world works."

It may be more surprising that Israel’s leadership doesn’t even listen to its own professional intelligence echelon. During the media frenzy of the last days a crucial headline has received close to no attention: Mossad chief Meir Dagan told the Knesset’s Foreign Relations Committee that Israel is gradually turning from a strategic asset into a liability for the United States of America.

As it’s a bit difficult to brush aside Dagan as a softheaded idealist, our policy makers will find another way not to listen. They will say, "this would never have happened under George W. Bush; this is only because the Obama administration is not friendly towards Israel. We simply need to wait for Obama to end this term; he won’t get reelected."

Nothing could be further from the truth. I have heard warnings that Israel is becoming a strategic liability for the U.S. from Americans, including high ranking members of the George W. Bush administration, for years. The only difference is that during the Bush years, nobody in the administration would say this on record or for attribution.

I doubt the government will listen even to Dagan: Netanyahu is frozen; Moshe Ya'alon believes in Israel’s eternal right to the Greater Israel; Eli Yishai has no clue about international relations; and Barak seems to have lost the ability to think clearly a long time ago.

I wish I could end on a note of optimism; I wish I could point out a psychological mechanism that will unblock Israel’s leadership from fear and self-righteousness. But I share David Grossman’s despair. All that is left for those of us who want to save Israel from itself — whether Israelis, Jews in the Diaspora or gentiles — is to continue the call to reason, even if we don’t know if, when and how it will be heard.

www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction/strenger-than-fiction-israel-s-bunker-mentality-1.293767

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From Haaretz.com Israeli News...

UN Chief proposes joint Turkey, Israel and U.S. Gaza flotilla probe

Ban Ki-moon hands Israel proposal for international probe panel headed by ex-New Zealand PM; senior government officials recommend responding favorably because Turkey will probably oppose it.

By BARAK RAVID | 01:23hrs - Sunday, 06 June, 2010

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has conveyed a proposal to Israel to set up an international commission of inquiry into the raid on the Gaza-bound aid flotilla a week ago.

The head of the committee would be former New Zealand prime minister Geoffrey Palmer, an expert on maritime law. Committee members would include representatives from the United States, Turkey and Israel.

Senior officials at the Foreign Ministry said Israel should consider the idea favorably.

Top officials in Jerusalem and European diplomats said Ban’s preliminary proposal, which he made in a phone call to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, does not precisely define the committee’s mandate. But it is certain to consider whether Israel’s takeover of the ship the Mavi Marmara contravened international law.

Ban reportedly suggested that he appoint the committee’s chairman and suggested Palmer as a candidate.

Senior government officials said the Foreign Ministry recommends responding favorably to establishing the committee because Turkey will probably oppose it.

“Such a committee will reveal many details about the link between [Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, the flotilla organizers and the IHH,” a senior official said. He was referring to a Turkish Islamic nongovernmental organization that reportedly has ties to terror groups.

“If the mandate is reasonable and does not include questioning IDF soldiers, such a committee could remove the sting from the affair and neutralize similar future flotillas,” the official added.

Ban’s proposal came after another proposal, for a committee like the one South Korea established after the sinking of one of its navy ships, was rejected. That committee, whose members included South Korea, the United States, Sweden, Canada and Australia, determined that North Korea had sunk the ship. This model, which the United States supported, was rejected by Israel because of the completely different circumstances of the two events.

Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are said to be leaning toward an examination of the events surrounding the takeover of the Mavi Marmara, with American or other international participation.

A senior source in the Prime Minister’s Bureau noted that Netanyahu opposes the questioning of Israel Defense Forces soldiers, but that he is not ruling out any options regarding “scrutiny of the events.”

According to a source in Barak’s office, “Barak opposes the questioning of soldiers and officers, but he is prepared for an examination under Israeli aegis with the participation of foreign observers.

Talks also continued over the weekend between Israel and the United States about the possibility of easing the blockade of Gaza. Dan Shapiro, head of the Israel desk at the U.S. National Security Council, remained in Israel for further discussions on the matter, after taking part, with special envoy George Mitchell, in proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinians on Thursday and Friday. He met over the weekend with National Security Adviser Uzi Arad, and is to continue his talks on Sunday.

A senior government official said Israel had accepted the U.S. proposal to launch official talks on ways to ease the Gaza blockade. But at this point, Jerusalem has reportedly rejected setting up an international force to check ships seeking to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. “That didn’t work in Lebanon or at the Rafah crossing, and it’s doubtful it will work in this case,” the official said.

A senior government official said a new date for the meeting between Netanyahu and U.S. President Barak Obama could be next week, after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ visit to Washington on Wednesday. However, the Netanyahu-Barak meeting could be postponed until the last week in June.

www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/un-chief-proposes-joint-turkey-israel-and-u-s-gaza-flotilla-probe-1.294376

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From Haaretz.com Israeli News...

Breaking out of the siege

If Israel is to break out of the international siege and strategic catastrophe it now faces, it urgently needs a different policy.

Haaretz Editorial | 03:45hrs - Sunday, June 06, 2010

The intelligence failure and faulty planning in last week's operation to board the Mavi Marmara led to a crisis in Israel's foreign relations in the blink of an eye and a low in its standing in world public opinion. The international community is demanding an investigation into the incident and is roundly criticizing the siege Israel continues to impose on the Gaza Strip's 1.5 million residents. Friendly countries such as the United States and France are demanding that the Israeli government lift restrictions on the passage into Gaza of goods and raw materials for civilian use.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his usual manner, rushed to raise the specter of the Iranian threat along with the adage that "the whole world is against us." Instead of locating the source of the fire scorching the diplomatic relations we built up with such effort, Netanyahu is following in the footsteps of his ostracized foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, accusing the world of hypocritical treatment of Israel.

In an effort to evade responsibility for the crisis and escape his obligation to fundamentally change his policy, the prime minister is distorting the nature of the criticism against his government and has plied it as hatred of the Jews.

Netanyahu and Lieberman are imposing a siege on a Jewish and democratic state that has professed to be a light unto the nations, but is becoming anathema among nations. The disagreement over halting construction in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem sorely eroded the goodwill Israel had garnered in the wake of Netanyahu's declared support for a two-state solution. Last month's nuclear nonproliferation conference diverted attention from the Iranian nuclear program to Israel's nuclear capabilities. The summit of countries bordering the Mediterranean, which had been due to open today in Barcelona, was scrapped following Arab leaders' refusal to be in the company of the Israeli foreign minister. And finally, the proximity talks with the Palestinians are being portrayed as a recipe for perpetuating the deadlock in the peace process.

Reasonable governments of democratic countries act in accordance with the interests of their citizens. Even if the world is "hypocritical," as Netanyahu claims, he must fundamentally change his government's aggressive and inward-looking approach; it is not within his power to change the nature of the rest of the world.

A thorough investigation of the Mavi Marmara incident and the lifting of the siege against civilians in Gaza are essential steps, but they are certainly not sufficient. If Israel is to break out of the international siege and strategic catastrophe it now faces, it urgently needs a different policy.

www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/breaking-out-of-the-siege-1.294408

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Editorial: Israel's bullets have killed its credibility

The Dominion Post | Wednesday, 02 June 2010



Israel believes its problems can be solved with bullets. It is wrong, and deserves the condemnation now raining down on its head for attacking a ship bringing aid to Gaza and killing at least 10 of those aboard.

There is no doubt that the actions of the "Gaza Freedom flotilla" were designed to be provocative and turn the world spotlight on the plight of the Palestinians suffering in Gaza as the result of Israeli-imposed sanctions.

However, it was not "an armada of hate and violence", as Israel's deputy foreign minister, Daniel Ayalon, has dubbed it.

Israel must explain why it believed there was no other way of reacting to the flotilla than with an assault launched in international waters in the hours of darkness by a highly trained and — by all accounts — lethally efficient commando unit. It must say why other options to deal with what was a policing problem were not used.

That explanation should be given to an international inquiry with which Israel fully co-operates. Nothing less will do.

Mr Ayalon has argued that the organisers were linked to al Qaeda and that they had a history of arms smuggling. He claims weapons found on the Mavi Marmara, the boat on which the fighting took place, had been prepared and were used against the commandos – though the evidence so far is that the only firearms involved in the fighting were those brought on board by the commandos.

Put bluntly, Israel has a credibility problem over Gaza. Its invasion in response to Hamas rocket attacks ended in excessive civilian casualties, according to a United Nations investigation led by respected South African judge Richard Goldstone. The report concluded that Israel deliberately set out to "punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population".

Now Israel is waging economic war on the 1.4 million people of Gaza, including women and children, however much it may deny it. According to UN agencies, 75 per cent of those crammed into its tiny 8km-by-35km barbed-wire borders rely on food aid. Sixty per cent have no daily access to water.

Israel says the aid being carried by the "armada" could have been unloaded at an Israeli port and then shipped to Gaza. That is unlikely. UN agencies and charities argue that Israel has banned or delayed the shipping of any items that could be used for other purposes. This includes items such as paediatric hygiene kits, bedding and school textbooks. In short, Israel has reduced Gaza to a desperate state.

Israel won a military victory when its commandos stormed the Mavi Marmara. None of its soldiers died, the flotilla was stopped and Israel will continue to decide what, if any, aid is delivered to Gaza. But it has lost politically. Its reaction to the flotilla was disproportionate, relations with countries sympathetic towards it have been damaged, and it has turned the world's eyes to Gaza.

For that, Israel's leaders have no-one to blame but themselves. Israel must now account for its actions to the world.

www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/opinion/editorials/3765141/Editorial-Israels-bullets-have-killed-its-credibility

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Editorial: Only outsiders will find truth on Gaza

The Dominion Post | 5:00AM - Wednesday, 09 June 2010



It is a basic rule of justice that those accused of a crime should not sit in judgment on themselves. For that reason, Israel should not be ruling on the rights and wrongs of its attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla last week.

Determining who is to blame for the deaths of nine people aboard a Turkish ship should be the work of an independent international body, as proposed by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Mr Ban has suggested that former New Zealand prime minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer be appointed to head an international panel that would include representatives of Israel and Turkey. It is a sensible suggestion that would ensure the countries directly involved have a voice in the inquiry. But no sooner had he put up the idea than Israel's Washington ambassador, Michael Oren, shot it down. "Israel is a democratic nation. Israel has the right and ability to investigate itself," he said.

Israel should think again. The inquiry represents an opportunity as well as a threat to Israel. Mr Oren's argument is the equivalent of the accused in a criminal case demanding not only the right to defend himself, but the right to present the prosecution's case and to pass judgment once the evidence has been heard. It is not credible.

A credible inquiry would, however, investigate not only the actions of the Israeli soldiers who stormed aboard the Mavi Marmara and the Israeli authorities who ordered the raid in international waters, but also the actions of the passengers aboard the vessel and the role of the Turkish Government. Photographs taken by other passengers lend weight to Israeli assertions that the soldiers were attacked with knives and clubs when they descended on the vessel.

An international inquiry also offers a way for Israel to draw other nations into solving the problem that is the Gaza Strip, a sliver of land on which Israel has effectively imprisoned 1.6 million Palestinians.

It says it has done so to deny terrorists the materials to make rockets that can be fired into Israeli territory. But there is a retributive quality to the blockade that has little to do with logistics and a great deal to do with trying to weaken Hamas politically.

As the International Crisis Group observed last month, it is a policy that is not only "morally appalling" but also failing. Hamas' standing in the Gaza Strip has not been weakened, but Israel's international reputation has. It is morally indefensible for Israel to punish the children of Gaza for the sins of their fathers, their fathers' fathers or anyone else.

Israel appears unconcerned about its international reputation. It is militarily superior to its neighbours and enjoys the friendship of the world's most powerful nation, the United States.

But things change. The long-term future of Israel can only be secured by it finding a way to co-exist peacefully with its neighbours. The United Nations inquiry offers Israel an opportunity to begin a constructive conversation. It should grasp it.

www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/opinion/editorials/3788808/Editorial-Only-outsiders-will-find-truth-on-Gaza

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FLOTILLA ATTACKED: Passengers on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara carrying 600 activists look down
from the decks to one of the many Israeli assault vessel that is about to attack the ship.


ASSAULT VESSEL: One of the many Israeli assault boats at the side of the Turkish passenger ship
Mavi Marmara carrying 600 activists, part of the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza, moments before the
battle for the ship in International waters.


ATTACK: Passengers on the second deck of the Turkish passenger ship the Mavi Marmara run as they
are surrounded by smoke from the tear gas fired from Israeli assault boats shortly after the men
had completed their evening prayer.


FLOTILLA ATTACK: Smoke from tear gas and explosions fills the second deck of the Turkish passenger
ship Mavi Marmara causing men carrying poles to run away from the area.

---

Israel military investigating deadly flotilla raid

Associated Press | 8:06AM - Wednesday, 06 June 2010

Israel's military said it will have its own experts examine what caused a naval raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla to turn deadly, while nations led by Turkey condemned the operation and intensified demands for an international investigation.

Turkey's president released a statement Tuesday from 21 Asian countries meeting at a security summit that said "all member states, except one, expressed their grave concern and condemnation for the actions undertaken by the Israeli Defense Forces."

President Abdullah Gul said 21 of the 22 nations in the grouping, which includes Israel, also called on the Jewish state to end its blockade of Gaza and to agree to an international investigation of the incident.

An overwhelming majority of the countries also called for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East and for Israel to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and place all of its nuclear facilities under the safeguard of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Gul said.

Israel managed to block a joint declaration by the group, whose decisions require consensus, that would have condemned the raid, forcing Turkey to issue a separate statement attached to the declaration.

Israel is widely believed to have a sizable nuclear arsenal. Israel refuses to confirm or deny the suspicions.

Israel's so-called policy of nuclear ambiguity is a cornerstone of its military deterrence. It has long said that a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace must precede such weapons bans.

Israel has not signed the nonproliferation treaty, which requires members to open nuclear facilities to inspection and to disarm.

In the May 31 raid, Israeli commandos rappelled onto the deck of one of the ships trying to break Israel's three-year-old blockade of Gaza. The soldiers were intercepted by a crowd of activists, setting off a clash that killed nine men — eight Turks and a Turkish American.

Israel says its soldiers began shooting only after a mob of pro-Palestinian activists attacked them — a version backed up by video footage released by the army. But the activists and their supporters say Israeli commandos needlessly opened fire.

The incident triggered a storm of criticism of Israel. Russia's powerful prime minister, Vladimir Putin, added Moscow's weight to the calls for an international probe.

"It has to be investigated specially," Putin said at a news conference in Istanbul with Turkey's prime minister, a fierce critic of Israel since its war in Gaza 18 months ago.

The Israeli experts will review several internal military investigations already under way. The military said it expects findings by July 04 into what went wrong with the naval operation.

Israel has so far failed to defuse the calls for an international investigation or reduce pressure to end the blockade. Israel says the blockade is needed to prevent Gaza's Hamas rulers from importing weapons.

Turkey unofficially sponsored the flotilla's lead ship, where the violence occurred, and the two countries' relations have suffered further strain since the raid.

In addition to the military inquiry, Israel's government is seeking a formula for a broader probe that would defuse calls for an impartial investigation.

Senior Israeli Cabinet ministers on Monday proposed establishing a commission of Israeli jurists, joined by foreign observers, whose mandate would be to examine the legality of the Gaza blockade and the commandos' conduct.

The proposal has been shown to US and international officials to see if it meets their criteria for an impartial probe, government officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not been officially announced.

The US Embassy had no comment on the details of the proposal.

International mediator Tony Blair appeared to back the Israeli outline in an interview on Israel's Channel 10 TV. "Any investigation has to be full and impartial, and there may be some international element that can be part of it," he said.

At the UN, where the Security Council called for an investigation, spokesman Faran Haq said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "understands that Israel is still considering how and if to bring an international element into the investigative process."

Past experience has made Israel wary of letting outside powers lead an investigation.

A UN-appointed panel headed by veteran war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone accused Israel of war crimes in the Gaza offensive in the winter of 2008-2009. Israel rejected the accusations.

In Gaza Tuesday, Palestinians said they retrieved the body of two more militant divers killed in a clash with Israeli sailors off the coast a day earlier. Israel's navy said Monday that it had opened fire on Palestinians in diving suits whom it spotted in the waters off Gaza. The military claimed, without providing details, that its forces prevented an attack on Israel.

Four bodies were retrieved on Monday and Gaza health official Dr. Moiaya Hassanain said two more bodies had been found Tuesday.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades said Monday that members of its marine unit were training in Gaza's waters.

www.stuff.co.nz/world/3789931/Israel-military-investigating-deadly-flotilla-raid