国际英语新闻：Israeli army probe defends flotilla raid

Some aboard, however, disputed Israel's claims and said troops shot sleeping passengers.

IHH, a Turkish organization and a major sponsor of the flotilla, released a report at the end of June, saying that the Israeli soldiers did not open fire on the ship as a warning, but rather to directly kill unarmed civilians.

"The participants saw the Israeli soldiers firing real bullets as they came down from the upper floors of the ship. (The participants) started to defend themselves with water bottles, chairs, sticks," read the report which was quoted on the Free Gaza Movement website, the major coordinator of the flotilla.

However, the Israeli army said events were otherwise.

"There were at least four events where people on the ship shot at our soldiers," Eiland said, noting that shell casings from non- IDF rounds were found aboard, as well as a bullet that hit one soldier in the knee, that was not from an IDF weapon.

There was an attempt to achieve three separate military goals at the same time in the takeover, senior army sources told Xinhua, adding "stop this flotilla, provide protection to our troops, and to avoid casualties on the other side as much as possible." "In retrospect," an official said, "we can say that we achieved the first one; we did not fully manage to achieve the two others."

Eiland did not say if any officers or soldiers would face repercussions over events surrounding the raid, but did say that the results "were presented and they were accepted in a very open way by those officers that were criticized in this report."