TEL AVIV - Israel mounted a diplomatic offensive on Wednesday, trying to contain damage from a damning UN report that accused the Jewish state and Palestinian resistance of war crimes during the Gaza war.
The Israeli leadership fears one recommendation of the report in particular, according to local media -- that the UN Human Rights Council submits the report to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, which could lead to charges being brought against senior Israeli officials involved in the war.
"The goal is to avoid a slippery slope which would lead Israel to the International Criminal Court in The Hague," the left-leaning Haaretz daily quoted a senior official as saying.
Hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu huddled with his foreign minister and senior political and legal advisors late into the night on Tuesday after the report was released at the UN headquarters by Judge Richard Goldstone, a former war crimes prosecutor.
The premier along with the Israeli president and defence minister were to telephone their counterparts around the world to drive home Israel's message that the report was one-sided and unbalanced, Haaretz said.
"We are going to deploy great diplomatic and political efforts on the international stage to block and contain" the effects of the Goldstone Commission report, said foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor.
"We fear this will be a hit to our image," he said. "But the recommendations of this report are so extreme that there is little chance that they will be followed on."
The UN probe said both Israel and Palestinian groups committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the Israeli 22-day war in December-January on Gaza.
It reserved some of its harshest language for the actions taken by Israel against the civilian population in the densely-populated Gaza Strip.
Both Israel and Hamas rejected the findings as unbalanced.
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