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The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly today to give Israel and the Palestinians five months to finish investigating the Goldstone Report's claims.

The final vote was 98-7; 31 countries abstained, and another 56 didn't bother to vote. The seven "no" votes were Canada, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Panama, Macedonia, and the United States. Most of the abstentions were European states (a full list of results is here).

The U.N. resolution gives Israel and "the Palestinian side" five months to finish investigating; as we noted earlier this week, it doesn't specify whether that demand is directed at Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.

Human Rights Watch issued a short statement earlier in support of a new United Nations resolution -- scheduled for a vote on Friday -- which gives Israel and the Palestinians five months to finish investigating the Goldstone Report's findings.

"Israel and Hamas have failed to conduct credible investigations thus far, so UN members need to ensure justice for civilian victims on all sides," said Steve Crawshaw, UN advocate at Human Rights Watch. "All states that support justice should endorse the resolution and maintain pressure on the parties to hold perpetrators of war crimes to account."

As we said yesterday, the resolution doesn't actually advance the report. It won't lead to a Security Council vote or an International Criminal Court referral or anything like that. But it does keep Goldstone on the UN's radar, and it guarantees another vote on the report in July.

The United Nations General Assembly will vote Friday on whether to give Israel and Palestine another five months to finish investigating the Goldstone Report's findings.

A resolution authorizing the delay was offered by Arab states, mostly to keep the report on the UN's agenda. It calls on Israel to conduct a "credible investigation" within five months, and makes the same demand of "the Palestinian side," though it doesn't say whether it's referring to Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.

The previous resolution (pdf), approved in November, gave both sides three months to report on their investigations. They submitted their preliminary findings last month, and human rights groups panned both the Israeli and Palestinian reports as whitewashes.

The Israeli government will not conduct an independent investigation of the Goldstone Report's findings, according to a report in the Jerusalem Post.

It's a single-source report, and it still hasn't been confirmed by the Israeli government. But an unnamed senior official in prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said Bibi is satisfied with the IDF's internal probe, the preliminary results of which were submitted to the United Nations earlier this month.

United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon can't say whether Israel and the Palestinian Authority are on the right track when it comes to investigating the Goldstone Report's conclusions.

Israel and Hamas, you'll remember, last month released preliminary results of their investigations. Neither was particularly convincing: Hamas absolved itself of any wrongdoing, and Israel rejected most of Goldstone's findings.

The United Nations is already poking holes in Israel's preliminary response to the Goldstone Report.

The IDF's response says the el-Bader flour mill -- the only working flour mill in Gaza, destroyed during Operation Cast Lead -- was hit by tank shells. But a United Nations de-mining team says it found the remains of a 500-pound Mk82 bomb inside the mill, according to a report in The Guardian by Rory McCarthy.

We blogged yesterday about the IDF's preliminary response to the Goldstone Report, which includes a rebuttal of three specific allegations of war crimes. A commenter raised a fair point: Since we wrote extensively about Goldstone's allegations, we should do the same with the IDF's rebuttal.

So, after the jump, a little detail on each of its three responses.

We've posted a copy of the IDF's preliminary response (pdf) to the Goldstone Report -- though I would suggest that you don't even bother reading it, honestly.

Much of the 52-page document outlines how the IDF investigates allegations of war crimes and other criminal activity. It's useful background -- but also not particularly relevant to the allegations in the Goldstone Report. The presence of a well-conceived judicial system does not guarantee justice. (Just ask O.J. Simpson.)

The second half of the report summarizes the progress of dozens of ongoing investigations, some initiated by the IDF, others by the Goldstone Report.

I've been waiting rather eagerly for the IDF's response to the Goldstone Report (probably a sign I need to find new hobbies); it was rumored to be ready for release as early as this afternoon.

Looks like we'll have to wait a while longer, though. Israel gave United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon a response today -- but it's only a 40-page explanation of how the IDF investigated allegations of war crimes during Operation Cast Lead, and not the results of the investigations themselves.

Diplomatic officials stressed that this letter is not the IDF's answer to the Goldstone Commission report. The IDF rebuttal is currently being completed, will number more than 1,000 pages and will answer point-by-point all the allegations in the Goldstone Report.

Israeli officials haven't said much about Goldstone this winter -- happy to see it recede from the headlines, I'm sure -- but they've stepped up their criticism over the last few days. Barak denounced it as "warped" in a press briefing earlier today.

Hamas' reported conclusion that it did not commit war crimes during Israel's Operation Cast Lead "contradicts all the facts on the ground," Human Rights Watch told the Majlis today.

The Islamist movement's indiscriminate rocket fire "landed exactly in civilian areas across Israel's south, which suggests that civilian[s] were the target," Fred Abrahams, a New York City-based senior emergencies researcher, wrote in an e-mail.

One of the worst things a journalist can hear from an editor is "find a local angle." Aluf Benn apparently got that order from his boss at Ha'aretz last night, because he went out to write about the Massachusetts Senate election (won by the Republican candidate, Scott Brown) and came back with this thesis:

Over the past nine months, Netanyahu has managed to curb pressure from Obama, who enjoys a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. Now, however, Obama will be more dependent on the support of his Republican rivals, the supporters and friends of Netanyahu.

I guess I missed the year in which the Democratic Congress -- which is still Democratic, by the way, despite Brown's win -- exerted any kind of real pressure on the Netanyahu government. Let's take a look at AIPAC's 2009 legislative report, shall we?

We were never terribly optimistic that the Goldstone Report would lead to meaningful punishments for the perpetrators of war crimes during Operation Cast Lead. Four months after its release, it has largely disappeared from the headlines; it doesn't appear destined for any immediate action at the United Nations.

Still, it continues to nudge both Israel and Hamas towards a measure of accountability.

We've long wondered why Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas asked the United Nations Human Rights Council to delay the Goldstone Report. Al-Jazeera reported at the time that Abbas bowed to U.S. pressure. But this morning Akiva Eldar presents a different theory in Ha'aretz -- one that reflects badly on the Israeli government, but probably won't help to boost Abbas' public image.

Ongoing fallout from Operation Cast Lead: Israel has agreed to pay the United Nations $10 million for damage to U.N. facilities caused during the war. A spokesman for the U.N. declined to provide any more details.

Is the Solomon Islands -- a desperately poor country in the South Pacific -- a key player in the struggle between Israel and Iran?

That's the conclusion from Yedioth Ahronoth, which has a bizarre report this morning claiming that Iran bribed the tiny island nation to vote against Israel at the United Nations.

The Solomon Islands has reportedly been turning against Israel for several months, according to Yedioth Ahronoth; the anti-Israeli swing culminated earlier this month with a vote in favor of the Goldstone Report.

"We have proven to Hamas that we have changed the equation ... [Operation Cast Lead] has restored Israel's deterrence ... Israel is not a country upon which you fire missiles and it does not respond. It is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild - and this is a good thing." - Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Jan. 12, 2009

"I began to see Gaza as, I suspect, many Gazans do: a floating island, a dystopian Atlantis, drifting farther away from contact with any other society." - Lawrence Wright

I finally got around to reading Wright's big New Yorker take out on the situation in the Gaza Strip and highly recommend it. Though Wright's story is subtitled "What really happened during the Israeli attacks?", the piece is more of a tour de misère of what ails Gaza than an investigation into the veracity of the Goldstone report. The unavoidable conclusion one draws is that Israel is building its own worst enemy.

The U.N. General Assembly voted this evening to adopt the Goldstone Report. The final vote was 114-18, with 44 countries abstaining. We'll post a country-by-country vote tally as soon as we can find it.

The U.S. was one of the countries to vote against the report, according to Mark Leon Goldberg at UN Dispatch.

The resolution requires the Security Council to act on the report if Israel or Hamas fail to launch "credible investigations" within three months, according to Ha'aretz.

It's been such a busy day that I'm just now remembering the U.N. General Assembly is debating the Goldstone Report. The debate is getting almost no attention in the Western media (it's a bad sign when Xinhua is the best source of information on a story).

Mark Leon Goldberg over at UN Dispatch has a good summary of the contours of the debate. We'll round up some details tonight for a fuller post.

I don't know if any of this came through in my earlier post, but as I sat on Capitol Hill this afternoon and listened to debate over the anti-Goldstone Report resolution, I found myself getting angry.

Furious, actually. The congressmen defending the resolution made no attempt to be honest; they made no effort to have an intelligent debate about Goldstone's findings. They smeared the report as the "hopelessly biased" product of an anti-Israel inquisition. Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., went so far as to compare Goldstone to the justices who approved the internment of Japanese prisoners during World War II.

And then 344 members of the United States Congress (here's the roll call) voted to bury his findings.

Final update: The final vote on the anti-Goldstone resolution was 344-36, with 22 people voting "present." The resolution passed.

Just so everyone's clear, this is a non-binding resolution. It urges the president and the secretary of state to keep condemning the report and to block it from reaching the Security Council, the International Criminal Court, and other world bodies. It's a symbolic victory for Israel, but it has no binding legal authority.

We'll post a link to the roll call later tonight so you can see who voted yes or no. Our live-blogging of the debate follows after the jump.