A body known as the “Documentation Committee” in the Hamas government's “Ministry of Justice” in Gaza has taken credit for the issuing of an arrest warrant against MK Tzipi Livni in Britain. A statement by the committee said that the move was part of the struggle “to hunt down Israeli war criminals” in Europe, “in the name of the victims of the Cast Lead campaign.”
In recent interviews with several Gaza news organizations, the body's chairman, Judge Siaa Al-Din Al-Madhun, said that his committee is behind the issuing of a warrant against Livni, in coordination with British lawyers. “Immediately upon learning that Tzipi Livni intended to visit Britain, the Documentation Committee filed a lawsuit in the British courts with the help of a group of local lawyers,” Al-Madhun said, and vowed to continue to “hunt down” Israeli “war criminals.”
The Intelligence and Terror Information Center noted that the committee was established in January 2009 as part of a Hamas campaign to vilify Israel and harass its leaders and IDF commanders by branding them as war criminals. The body's full name is “The Central Committee for Documentation and the Filing of Lawsuits Against the Israeli War Criminals.” Upon its establishment, it was decided that the committee would be the only formal body in Gaza to handle this matter.
Al-Madhun said that the committee appointed 160 people into teams divided among the districts of Gaza in order to collect data from witnesses to the Cast Lead campaign. “The large scale of this body's activity clearly shows a highly-resourced and established effort by the Hamas government to vilify Israel after Cast Lead,” the Intelligence and Terror Information Center said. Hamas, it said, is carrying out “intense activity to leverage the Goldstone report” – a reference to the recent UN report that portrayed Israel as a war criminal.