Israel defies global condemnation

TEL AVIV:

Israel defied world condemnation and said that it will not lift its blockade of Gaza.

The defiance came despite the United Nations' first steps to investigate the killing of nine civilians on board a flotilla of protest ships.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified the attack on the ships by saying that a ship can carry tons of weapons and hundreds of rockets. Therefore, he said Israel had to scrutinize each of the six ships approaching Gaza on Monday.

Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva has passed a resolution condemning the attack.

It has called for Israel to lift the blockade and has agreed to send an “independent international fact-finding mission” to investigate the raid.

Eight Turks, US national shot dead in Israeli raid

Eight Turks and a US national of Turkish origin were shot dead in an Israeli raid on Gaza-bound aid ships, Anatolia news agency reported.

The nationalities of the dead were determined after post-mortem examinations at a forensic institute in Istanbul, where the bodies were flown early on Thursday, Anatolia said.

The agency reported that all the activists were shot dead. Forensic experts found bullet marks on all the bodies and determined that one was shot at close range.

The exact circumstances of the activists' deaths would become clear in a ballistics examination that would take about a month to complete, Anatolia added.

The agency said the bodies were handed over to relatives after the autopsies. The nine victims were all aboard the Turkish ferry, Mavi Marmara, the lead ship of the aid flotilla, where most of the violence occurred in Monday's pre-dawn raid by Israeli forces.

Israel charges that the passengers on the boat attacked its soldiers, but organisers of the flotilla counter that Israeli forces started firing as soon as they landed.