ISRAEL: Israel yesterday issued a stinging letter of protest to the EU presidency yesterday, saying it was "sickened" by Foreign Minister Mr Brian Cowen's statement on Wednesday that Israeli forces had shown "a reckless disregard for human life" during the military operation in Gaza's Rafah area, reports David Horovitz.
Irish ambassador Mr Patrick Hennessy was called to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem and handed the exceptionally bitter text by the Israeli Foreign Ministry's Deputy Director General, Mr Ran Curiel.
An Irish official here said that the Israelis first made their anger known by telephone on Wednesday night - "they took issue with a number of points" in Mr Cowen's statement, the official said - and then asked the ambassador to come to Jerusalem to convey their written complaint, which the ambassador has now passed on to Dublin.
Mr Cowen had charged that Israel's use of helicopters and tanks to confront a Rafah protest march was "completely disproportionate to any threat faced by the Israeli military".
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman told The Irish Times that the letter handed to Mr Hennessy was the most harshly worded such protest he could ever recall. The Ministry did not release the text of the letter, but it did issue a Hebrew-language statement, taking "sickened" offence at what it called Mr Cowen's effort "to link the regrettable events that occurred yesterday in Rafah" with "the foul murder" earlier this month of pregnant Israeli mother Tali Hatuel and her four daughters by Palestinian terrorists.
The statement added that Israel "rejected any insinuation aimed at sullying our soldiers that hints they deliberately targeted children" during the military operations in Rafah - where eight civilians, four of them children, were killed, apparently by an Israeli tank shell, on Wednesday. (Israeli officials say the shell was fired at an abandoned building, and may have gone through it and into the crowd of thousands of Palestinian demonstrators.) Israel, the statement went on, "makes every effort" to prevent civilian casualties.
The Ministry said it expected the EU presidency "to be more careful" than to rely on "biased and false information" - an apparent reference to Palestinian claims that Israeli troops deliberately fired on the demonstrators.
"There is sometimes room for criticism," the statement allowed, "but no room for slipping into aggressive rhetoric which crosses the legitimate boundaries" as recent EU statements had.
Asked whether this written protest represented the end of the matter, the Irish official said that was now up to Dublin, while the Israeli spokesman said: "It would be nice to get an apology. But we don't expect one."