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The 117-page report by Amnesty International says many of the hundreds of civilian deaths in the conflict "cannot simply be dismissed as 'collateral damage' incidental to otherwise lawful attacks - or as mistakes".

"All of those things occurred on a scale that constitutes pattern - and constitutes war crimes," Donatella Rovera, who headed the research, told the BBC. The document also gives details of several cases where it says people - including women and children posing no threat to troops - were shot at close range as they were fleeing their homes in search of shelter.

Lives were lost because Israeli forces "frequently obstructed access to medical care," the report says. It also reiterates previous condemnations of the use of "imprecise" weapons such as white phosphorous and artillery shells.

The destruction of homes, businesses and public buildings was in many cases "wanton and deliberate" and "could not be justified on the grounds of military necessity", the report adds.

It says "disturbing questions" remain unanswered as to why children playing on roofs and medical staff attending the wounded were killed by "highly accurate missiles" whose operators had detailed views of their targets.

The Amnesty report says no evidence was found that Palestinian militants had forced civilians to stay in buildings being used for military purposes, contradicting Israeli claims that Hamas repeatedly used "human shields". However, Amnesty says Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups had endangered Palestinian civilians by firing rockets from residential neighbourhoods and storing weapons in them. It says local residents had in one case told researchers that Hamas fighters had fired a rocket from the yard of a government school.

In the cases it had investigated, Amnesty said civilian deaths "could not be explained as resulting from the presence of fighters shielding among civilians, as the Israeli army generally contends". However, Amnesty does accuse Israel of using civilians, including children, as human shields in Gaza, forcing them to remain in houses which its troops were using as military positions, and to inspect sites suspected of being booby trapped. It also says Palestinian militants rocket fire from the Gaza Strip was "indiscriminate and hence unlawful under international law", although it only rarely caused civilian casualties.

Thirteen Israelis were killed, including three civilians, during the offensive, which Israel launched with the declared aim of curtailing cross-border rocket attacks.

The Israeli government has in the past refused to co-operate with UN human rights council investigations, including one led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It is not clear whether Israel will co-operate with the new investigation. "This committee is instructed not to seek out the truth but to single out Israel for alleged crimes," said Yigal Palmor, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. He said the council was a discredited body.

Mr Goldstone is a former UN chief prosecutor for war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He is also a former judge at the South African constitutional court. He is also on the board of governors at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Mr Goldstone said he was "shocked, as a Jew", to be invited to head the mission.

The outlines of the evidence gathered comes hard on the heels of the disclosure by the Oranim Academy's pre-military course last week of devastating witness accounts supplied by soldiers involved in the fighting, including the "unjustified" shooting of civilians.

With Israeli newspapers threatening new disclosures, the New York Times has weighed in with an interview with a reservist describing the rules of engagement for the Gaza operation. Amir Marmor, a 33-year-old military reservist, told the newspaper that he was stunned to discover the way civilian casualties were discussed in training talks before his tank unit entered Gaza in January. "Shoot and don't worry about the consequences" was the message from commanders, said Marmor. Describing the behaviour of a lieutenant-colonel who briefed the troops, Marmor added: "His whole demeanour was extremely gung-ho. This is very, very different from my usual experience. I have been doing reserve duty for 12 years, and it was always an issue how to avoid causing civilian injuries. He said that in this operation, we are not taking any chances. Morality aside, we have to do our job. We will cry about it later."

Last Thursday, the special rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Council, Richard Falk, said that the assault on Gaza appeared to be a "war crime of the greatest magnitude" and called on the UN to establish an experts' group to investigate potential violations.

Attempts by the Israeli media to publish the rules of engagement for the Gaza campaign have been blocked by the military censor, but in the past couple of weeks the contents of those rules have begun to to emerge in anecdotal evidence - suggesting strongly that soldiers were told to avoid Israeli casualties at all costs by means of the massive use of firepower in a densely populated urban environment.

An investigation by reporter Uri Blau, published on Friday in Haaretz, disclosed how Israeli soldiers were ordering T-shirts to mark the end of operations, featuring grotesque images including dead babies, mothers weeping by their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques. Another T-shirt designed for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex" next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A shirt designed for the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion depicts a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills".

Leading calls against the wall has been Argentina's President, Cristina Kirchner, who last week told the mayor of San Fernando, Osvaldo Amieiro, that she was "astonished" at the proposal, describing it in terms that suggested social apartheid.

The controversy has emerged at a sensitive time. With legislative elections due in June, crime has emerged as one of the biggest issues, not least in the urban belt surrounding the capital, which has one of the highest rates of crime in the country. The crime rate in Argentina has nearly doubled in the past two decades

Argentina has announced a decline in the numbers living in poverty, but this was met with much scepticism by independent analysts in a country where inflation is running at up to 25%.

Argentina has also been hit hard by the economic downturn, with industrial output falling by 12.2% in February.

More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including more than 900 civilians, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which published a list of names of the dead. Israel has said the toll was lower, and the "vast majority" of the dead were militants. But it did not publish a list to support the assertion.

In a joint statement, nine Israeli rights groups said the decision to close the investigation without bringing charges "only strengthens the need for the attorney general to allow for an independent nonpartisan investigative body to be established in order to look into all Israeli army activity" in Gaza.Defense minister, Ehud Barak, said the investigation showed that Israel possesses "the most moral army in the world".

The report cited two alleged incidents from January 3. In one, it said, after a tank round struck near a house, a father and his two sons -- both younger than 11 -- emerged to look at the damage. "As they exited their home, IDF soldiers shot and killed them (at the entrance to their house), with the daughter witnessing," the report said. In the second, it said, "Israeli soldiers entered a family house in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City. Standing at the doorstep, they asked the male head of the household to come out and shot him dead, without warning, while he was holding his ID, hands raised up in the air, and then started to fire indiscriminately and without warning into the room where the rest of the family was huddled together. "The eldest son was shouting in vain the word 'Children' in Hebrew to warn the soldiers. The shooting did not stop until everyone was lying on the floor. The mother and four of the brothers, aged 2-12 years, had been wounded, one of them, aged 4, fatally."

The alleged instances occurred during Operation Cast Lead, which was launched December 27 to halt rocket attacks into southern Israel from Gaza and ended January 17 with a cease-fire. The U.N. report called the response by Israel disproportionate. Of the 1,453 people estimated killed in the conflict, 1,440 were Palestinian, including 431 children and 114 women, the report said. The 13 Israelis killed included three civilians and six soldiers killed by Hamas, and four soldiers killed by friendly fire, it said.

The report said the Israeli operation resulted in "a dramatic deterioration of the living conditions of the civilian population." It cited "targeted and indiscriminate" attacks on hospitals and clinics, water and sewage treatment facilities, government buildings, utilities and farming and said the offensive "intensified the already catastrophic humanitarian situation of the Palestinian people." It said Israeli strikes damaged more than 200 schools and left more than 70,000 people homeless. "There are strong and credible reports of war crimes and other violations of international norms," it said, adding that many observers have said war crimes investigations should be undertaken.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, called the report "another example of the one-sided and unfair attitude of the rapporteur of the Human Rights Council, a council that has been criticized by current and previous secretaries-general for its unbalanced attitudes toward Israel." He added, "The negative fixation on Israel by the council has done a disservice to the issue of human rights internationally as has been attested to by the leading NGO's [nongovernmental organizations] on human rights."

Another report issued Monday also was critical of the IDF. The report from Physicians for Human Rights said the Gaza incursion violated IDF's own code of ethics. The report by the medical group, which shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, cited instances where it said IDF forces did not evacuate injured civilians for days and prevented Palestinian teams from reaching the wounded, and said some of them died as a result. It said 16 Palestinian medical personnel were killed by IDF fire and 25 were wounded during the IDF operation, and accused the IDF of attacking 34 medical centers in violation of the IDF's own "ethical code for fighting terror." In response, the IDF accused Hamas of having used medical vehicles, facilities and uniforms to conceal its members' activity. "Hamas used ambulances to 'rescue' terror activists from the battlefield and used hospitals and medical facilities as hiding places," the Israelis said in a written statement. "Despite this, throughout the fighting, IDF forces were instructed to avoid firing at ambulances, even if they were being used by armed fighters. They were instructed only to shoot if there was fire towards our forces emanating from the direction of the ambulance." Regarding the reported delays in casualty evacuations, "there existed real difficulties in evacuating the injured, due to the roadblocks, booby-trapped roads and dirt mounds placed by the Hamas as well as the considerable damage to the infrastructure," the statement said.

he Israeli daily Haaretz newspaper reported that Israeli soldiers who had finished basic training ordered the shirts, one of which showed a pregnant Arab in the crosshairs of a gun sight with a caption reading "1 Shot 2 Kills." Another showing a small child in a gun's sight was captioned, "The smaller they are, the harder it is." "The examples presented by The Haaretz reporter are not in accordance with IDF values and are simply tasteless," the Israeli military said in a written statement. "This type of humor is unbecoming and should be condemned."

Israeli soldiers said last week that Palestinian civilians were killed and Palestinian property intentionally destroyed during Israel's military campaign in Gaza, according to Haaretz. The IDF has said it is investigating the claims, but its top general expressed skepticism Monday. "I don't believe that soldiers serving in the IDF hurt civilians in cold blood, but we shall wait for the results of the investigation," Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi, the chief of staff, said in a speech. "I tell you that this is a moral and ideological army." He blamed Hamas for choosing "to fight in heavily populated areas. "It (was) a complex atmosphere that includes civilians and we took every measure possible to reduce harm of the innocent," he said, according to an IDF statement.

The allegations date back to November 2001, when as many as 2,000 Taliban prisoners died in transit after surrendering during one of the regime's last stands, according to a State Department report from 2002.

Witnesses have claimed that forces with the U.S.-allied Northern Alliance placed the prisoners in sealed cargo containers over the two-day voyage to Sheberghan Prison, suffocating them and then burying them en masse using bulldozers to move the bodies, according to the State Department report. Some Northern Alliance soldiers have said that some of their troops opened fire on the containers, killing those within.

A former U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, Pierre Prosper, told the Times that the Bush administration was reluctant to investigate the deaths, even though Dostum was on the payroll of the CIA and his soldiers worked with U.S. special forces in 2001.

Dostum was suspended from his military post last year on suspicion of threatening a political rival, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently rehired him, the Times reported.

In a statement read on state TV, Mr Maliki said he condemned the killings as a "breach of the security pact".

He called on the US to "release the detainees and hand over those responsible for this crime to the courts".

The chairman of the provincial council, Mahmud Abd al-Rida, said the raid had embodied the "meaning of the occupation". "Their claim of friendship and early withdrawal from our dear land, according to the security agreement signed by the two Iraqi and US parties, is meaningless," he said.

The complicated Status of Forces Agreement was signed in November last year and came into force in early 2009. It requires all military operations in Iraq to have the government's approval and allows for US soldiers to face trial if they commit crimes off base.

He says that a state prosecutor to whom he took his findings refused to pursue the cases for fear of being killed himself. Gordan Malic is another journalist who now relies on police protection. "Organised crime has become part of the establishment," he says.

The deputy head of Croatia's privatisation fund is currently on trial after he was secretly filmed by prosecutors apparently stuffing a brown envelope filled with money into his pocket. The pictures were all over the newspapers, the film is on YouTube (in Croatian). The Index of Economic Freedom recently ranked Croatia below several African states in one of its corruption measurements.

"You can see corruption with government officials and practically ministerial-level people with wealth that cannot be explained," says Natasha Srdoc from the anti-corruption think tank the Adriatic Institute for Public Policy.

"Croatia needs to put an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and protection of property rights in place before it gets into the EU, because if it is allowed to get in before then it will not reform - it won't do anything."

Croatian police recently arrested a number of suspects in a mafia crackdown.

The crackdown has been prompted by Croatia's desire to join the European Union (on 1 April Croatia became a member of Nato). But some here, like politics professor Zarko Puhovski of Zagreb University, complain of double standards.

"If you have Bulgaria and Romania in the European Union, if you have a divided Cyprus, if you have Greece with all the corruption and problems with its judiciary, if you have Baltic states with catastrophic minority politics and so on, then you can't see why Croatia has to commit itself to all these reforms before being accepted."

Others suggest that some EU member states opposed to further expansion have exaggerated Croatia's problems with organised crime and corruption in order to damage its accession prospects.

This is why Obama, a Democrat, is promising the people at the CIA that they will not be prosecuted, because when they tortured people, they did so strictly within the framework of the then-administration's interpretation of the law. This is a concept that is not entirely foreign to European legal thought. Under German criminal law, for instance, the actions committed by a person who could have assumed his behavior was permissible, are considered excusable, albeit not justified.

Nevertheless, the idea that "what was lawful then cannot be unlawful today" -- as the late Baden-Württemberg Governor Hans Filbinger, who had been a judge during the Third Reich, famously told SPIEGEL in a 1978 interview -- does not always apply.

This week, though, Kaczynski has found his old form again -- with the unexpected help of SPIEGEL. "The Germans are attempting to shake off the guilt for a giant crime," he said, commenting on the latest SPIEGEL cover story, " The Dark Continent: Hitler's European Holocaust Helpers."

Karoubi's Etemad-e Melli website said on Saturday he had visited families of some of the many people detained after the election, including former vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who was part of his campaign and was arrested on June 16. "The recent detainees were not opponents of the system. They are members of the establishment who had some complaints against the result of the election," Karoubi said.

Iran's police chief, Ismail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, on Wednesday put the total number of detainees in connection with the unrest at 1,032 and said most had been freed. The rest had been "referred to the public and revolutionary courts", he said.

The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said on Tuesday reports from within Iran indicated that as many as 2,000 people, including opposition leaders, professors, journalists, students and protesters may be in detention across the country.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a report this week that Israel was also halting entry to Gaza of building materials and spare parts needed to repair damage from its 22-day invasion late last December. "Such a pattern of continuing blockade under these conditions amounts to such a serious violation of the Geneva Conventions as to constitute a continuing crime against humanity," Falk said in a statement released in Geneva.

Prior to leaving Cyprus, the ship was inspected by Cypriot authorities in response to Israeli demands to determine whether it carried any weapons, according to the UN investigator. "None were found and Israeli authorities were so informed." "Nonetheless, the 21 peace activists on the boat were arrested, held in captivity and have been charged with 'illegal entry' to Israel even though they had no intention of going to Israel," Falk added.

The international community - including the US - swiftly rallied to Zelaya as the victim of an illegal overthrow which evoked grim memories of central America's cold war-era upheavals. The UN general assembly today condemned the coup and demanded Zelaya's immediate return to power.

Several Latin American countries have suspended trade with Honduras and the World Bank has "paused" lending, piling further pressure on the isolated government in Tegucigalpa to back down.The strongest language during the crisis has come from Chávez who urged Hondurans to rebel and reinstate his ally. "I'll do everything possible to overthrow this gorilla government of Honduras."

The authorities have shut down several TV and radio stations and those that remain on air have ignored the crisis and broadcast soap operas and cooking programmes. The new government said no coup had taken place and that Zelaya was constitutionally removed by the army with congressional and supreme court support.

The flamboyant landowner was elected in 2006 as a conservative but tacked to the left and became a Chávez ally. He was popular among many of Honduras's poor but concern over crime, corruption and his governing style lowered his approval rating to around 30%.He angered the courts, army, congress and his own party by trying to hold a non-binding referendum which may have paved the way for him to change the constitution to run again when his term expired.Days before the coup Zelaya fired the armed forces chief, who refused to cooperate in the referendum, and defied a supreme court ruling to abandon the vote.

As his ratings fell Zelaya clashed with the media over stories about crime and government corruption and became isolated in congress, with his own party turning against him.Accusations that he violated the constitution came to a climax over his push for a referendum which might have abolished presidential term limits. The courts, army and congress joined forces to oust him.

The source for many of the early reports of civilian casualties was a handful of government doctors in the war zone, who described the scene at makeshift clinics to the international media as the army offensive unfolded. They have since been detained by the Sri Lankan government and there is confusion over their fate. Adams claimed they were being held to prevent information about war crimes getting out.

The BBC News investigation also studies claims that some of those held in Albania were killed for their organs, and that physical evidence gathered by UN investigators in Albania was destroyed by the International War Crimes Tribunal.