Israel denied committing war crimes in a response it was to hand the United Nations on Friday to demands that it probe allegations over its Gaza offensive, a government official said.

The official said the letter stresses the army did not intentionally kill civilians, but hours before it was to be delivered to UN chief Ban Ki-moon it remained unclear whether Israel stood firm in refusing to hold an independent inquiry into the offensive.

Information Minister Yuli Edelstein said earlier in the week that Israel rejected the UN demand for a "verification commission."

But Israeli media have said the government may agree to a limited probe to deflect some of the criticism over the three-week offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis just over a year ago.

The investigators would examine decisions and orders given by government officials and military top brass and would interview only senior officials, the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot said on Friday.

The UN General Assembly called on Israel and Hamas in November to conduct independent investigations and endorsed the Goldstone report, a UN probe into the war that accused both sides of war crimes.
Both Israel and Hamas have rejected claims their forces may have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity.

The letter of about 40 pages that was to be delivered on Friday insists Israel was exercising its right of self-defence in the face of "terrorist attacks," during the military operation it launched on December 27, 2008 in response to Palestinian rocket fire, a government official said.

Edelstein this week dismissed the Goldstone report as "anti-Semitic," even though its main author, South African international war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone, is Jewish.

Military investigators have said they found no evidence that any soldier deliberately attacked civilians during the conflict and have blamed civilian casualties on the chaos of war.

But leading Israeli human rights groups have urged Israel to agree to the UN request and "establish, without delay, an independent and impartial investigation."

The Hamas rulers of Gaza for their part claimed this week that their investigations showed that Palestinian fighters in the coastal strip did not target Israeli civilians during the war, a claim rejected by Human Rights Watch.

"Hamas's claim that rockets were intended to hit Israeli military targets and only accidentally harmed civilians is belied by the facts," the New York-based group said.

The 575-page Goldstone report recommended its conclusions be referred to the International Criminal Court prosecutor in The Hague if Israel and Hamas fail to carry out credible investigations.