MOBILE BULLETIN – 1935GMT – 29 Nov 09
The latest news from Al Jazeera
Hamas says that it is on the verge of starting its own investigatoin into whether it committed war crimes during Israel’s war on Gaza.
The probe is one of the mani requirements of the recent UN-backed Goldstone Report into the conflict, which took place durign December and January. Most of the report’s criticism was reserved for Israel.
In a rare interview, Ismial Haniya, the deposed Palestinian prime minister, also told Al Jazeera’s Zeina Awad that he is still hopeful of exchanging Gilad Shalit, a captured Israeli soldier, for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jalis.
John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old man being hedl in a Munich prison, will stand trial on Monday, accused of assisting in the murders of nearly 28,000 people.
Prosecutors in Germany say that Demjanjuk’s crimes were committed more than 65 years ago as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland in 1943 and 1944 during the second world war.
However, Demjanjuk, a Ukranian national, insists that he was simply an ulnucky captive of the Germans during the war. Following Germany’s defeat, he emigrated to the United States in 1946 to escape a brutal past.
But hundreds of Holocaust survivors and their family members believe he was one of the death camp’s brutal guards.
Al Jazeera’s Harry Smith reports.