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The fighting in Gaza is already a distant memory for many Palestinians, and any investigation is no longer seen as relevant or important, argued Bassem Eid, the executive director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.

Day by day the Palestinians are caught up in violence and political turmoil that leaves them reflecting on the last 24 hours, rather than events that happened months or years ago, Eid said on Thursday.

He believes Palestinians are also of the opinion that the UN and the UNHRC are largely toothless tigers. They feel nothing will come of the Goldstone report, as the history already tells the Palestinians that the UN cannot deliver.

"If the problem of the Palestinian refugees took the UN 63 years and it has not been resolved, imagine how many years the Goldstone report will take to implement its recommendations," said Eid.

On the Israeli side, the government believes that the steps it has already taken are sufficient, said Sarit Michaeli, spokeswoman for B'Tselem, a non-government organization focusing on human rights situation in the occupied territories.

B'Tselem's major beef with Israel is that its investigations to date have been internal by military police officers and other similar functionaries and have only examined specific cases during the fighting rather than taking in a more global look at policy.

"They don't look at suspicions that pertain to the choice of targets, the open-fire regulations," said Michaeli.

"The question is still open as to whether the troops operating during Cast Lead were operating on the basis of open-fire regulations that allowed them to fire against people who were not clearly participating in the hostilities," she added.

B'Tselem and other Israeli rights movements believe Israel is perfectly capable of conducting thorough independent investigations, but Michaeli said she would not comment on whether she thought it likely such an inquiry would take place.

The more time that passes, it appears the UN is less and less serious in its desire to learn what really happened during those three weeks in Gaza, said Eid. If he is correct then the families who lost loved ones, mainly in Gaza, but also in Israel, may never get the answers they seek.