Public opinion throughout the world largely deplored the violence with which Israel enforced its blockade of the Hamas-ruled enclave and stopped the convoy, leaving nine Turkish civilians dead.
Israel's response is a report that exonerates the military with only a few caveats and pats Israel on the back, not only over the conduct of the raid but over the blockade of Gaza in general.
As we report today, 52 separate military police investigations over the last two years into Israel's December 2008 offensive in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, which resulted in the deaths of 759 Palestinian non-combatants, have yielded precious little. The level of casualties in the offensive was shocking.
A single lethal air strike on a house where about a hundred civilians were sheltering killed 21 of them. There were well-documented cases of Israeli troops using children as human shields. These were corroborated in some instances by Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli human rights activists and former army veterans, some of whose members witnessed these events.
A country that resorts to such inhumane tactics while presenting itself as a standard bearer for democracy should be asking itself hard questions about whether it was striking the right balance between security demands and respect for the basic human rights of civilians caught up in a war zone.
