On Sept. 29, the United Nations released its report by the fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict.

The head of the mission was Richard Goldstone, a highly respected South African jurist and former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for both Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

His daughter Nicole, interviewed in the Jerusalem Post, said her father "is a Zionist... My dad loves Israel and it wasn't easy for him to see and hear what happened."

Under its mandate, the mission considered "any actions by all parties that might have constituted violations of international human rights law or international humanitarian law," while placing "the civilian population of the region at the center of its concerns regarding the violations of international law."

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., characterized this mandate as "unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable."

According to Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, during the three weeks of the conflict, 13 Israelis were killed (including three civilians and four soldiers by friendly fire) and 1,382 Palestinians. More than 1,000 non- combatant Palestinians were killed, including 320 children, 111 women, 248 policemen and 123 elderly men.

Given the disparity in civilian deaths, one wonders what Ambassador Rice considers unbalanced.

Israel refused to cooperate with the mission, denying it entrance into Israel. Judge Goldstone wrote in The Guardian: "Those who feel that our report failed to give adequate attention to specific incidents or issues should be asking the Israeli government why it failed to argue its cause."

The report documents numerous cases of Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed civilians. Gaza's only operating flour mill, and municipal wells supplying water to 25,000 people, were destroyed in air attacks.

Chicken farms were systematically flattened over two days by armored bulldozers, including automated sorting and packing equipment, and nearly 100,000 chickens were crushed in their coops. A retaining wall at a wastewater treatment plant was breached by a bomb, releasing 200,000 cubic meters of raw sewage onto adjacent farmland.

None of these were military targets.

I urge everyone to reach their own conclusions by downloading the report from tinyurl.com/pnt3fg.

Larry Tepper is a retired computer programmer in Boulder writing on behalf of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center.