War crimes arrest awaiting Olmert's UK visit

Former Israeli premier Ehud Olmert would probably face arrest on war crime charges if he visited Britain, a leading British newspapers has quoted a lawyer as saying.

"Neither Olmert nor Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister during the Cast Lead offensive, and a member of Israel's war cabinet, would enjoy immunity from prosecution for alleged breaches of the Geneva conventions,” the Middle East editor of The Guardian , Ian Black, quoted Daniel Machover as saying.

Machover has been involved in intensifying legal work after the controversial Goldstone report on the three-week conflict. “Neither are ministers any longer,” he explained.

"Prosecutions of Israeli political and military figures remain likely despite the failure to obtain an arrest warrant for Ehud Barak, the defense minister, when he visited the UK earlier this month.. In the Barak case, a magistrate accepted advice from the Foreign Office that the minister enjoyed state immunity and rejected an application made on behalf of several residents of the Gaza Strip".

This is while the United Nations General Assembly is scheduled to meet on November 4 in a bid to consider a UN report, which accuses Israel of war crimes, as well as crimes against humanity, during the weeks-long onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

The UN-commissioned report, written by South African war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone and three other international experts, details what investigators call Israeli actions "amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity." The 575-page report asserts seven incidents in which Palestinian civilians were shot while leaving their homes, trying to run for safety or waving white flags.

The report says Israel targeted a mosque at prayer time, killing 15 people, and shelled a Gaza City house where soldiers had forced Palestinian civilians to assemble. These attacks constitute war crimes, the report says.

The probe also found Israel violated international humanitarian law in several ways. Dozens of Palestinian police officers were killed at the start of Gaza onslaught when Israel bombed their stations. The police force was not involved in the hostilities and, as such, should have been treated as civilians. Palestinians, in addition, were used as human shields being forced to walk ahead of Israeli soldiers searching civilian neighborhoods.

More than 1,500 Palestinians, large number of them women and children, were killed during three weeks of Israel's land, sea and air assault, Cast Lead offensive, in the impoverished coastal sliver. The offensive also inflicted $ 1.6 billion worth of damage to the Gazan economy.