The United States last night vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel in the wake of the artillery attack which killed 18 Palestinian civilians last week in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.
The veto on the resolution, on which Britain abstained, came despite efforts to redraft the original text to make it more acceptable to its opponents.
The US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, said the resolution, proposed by Qatar and also calling on Israel to withdraw its forces from the area "does not display an even-handed characterisation of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace".
Although the resolution was modified by Qatar to include condemnation of rocket attacks into Israel, Mr Bolton described it as "in many places biased against Israel and politically motivated". France and Russia voted in favour of the resolution, which called for secretary-general Kofi Annan to launch a 30-day fact-finding mission to investigate Wednesday's attack. Both Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem have called for a fuller investigation into Wednesday's killings than the internal inquiry by the Israeli military, which found that a defect in the artillery battery's hi-tech guidance system had misdirected the shells.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1963445.ece
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