Tel Aviv - Israel's military Advocate General has closed a probe into reports that soldiers taking part in Israel's recent offensive in the Gaza Strip intentionally killed civilians, after he found the claims "were based on hearsay and not supported by specific personal knowledge."

"It was found that once the claims were checked, they were not supported by the facts as determined by the investigation," an Israel Defence Force(IDF) statement released Monday afternoon said.

The investigation was launched after soldiers who participated in the Israeli operation told a symposium last month of lax rules of engagement that allowed civilians to be killed.

One squad leader recounted an incident where the company commander ordered that an elderly Palestinian woman be shot and killed. She was walking on a road about 100 metres from a house the company had commandeered.

The IDF statement said that "the soldier witnessed no such thing, and was only repeating a rumour he had heard."

"This same soldier admitted that he had not witnessed the additional disrespectful and immoral incidents he had described during the conference," the statement added.

Another soldier at the conference had described how a sniper shot dead a mother and her two children from the roof of a house, after soldiers on the ground floor had failed to inform him he should hold his fire because they were ordering the families living in the building to leave.

According to the IDF statement, the soldier had also not witnessed this incident.

"After checking the claim, it was found that during this incident a force had opened fire in a different direction, towards two suspicious men who were unrelated to the civilians in question," the statement said.

The IDF also said that during its investigation, participants at the symposium admitted that their claims regarding the Israeli army's use of phosphorous munitions had been based on what they had heard and read in media reports, rather than on their personal knowledge.

"It is unfortunate that none of the speakers at the conference was careful to be accurate in the depiction of his claims, and even more so that they chose to present various incidents of a severe nature, despite not personally witnessing and knowing much about them," Military Advocate General, Brigadier Avichai Mendelblit, said.

Brigadier Mendelblit's conclusions referred only to the claims from the symposium, the IDF said, and were not a substitute for other investigations.

The claims from the symposium raised a furore when they were published in the Ha'aretz daily on March 19, and nine Israeli human rights organizations demanded the country's attorney general establish an "independent" investigative body, not linked to the military, to examine the allegations.

They said the government's failure to establish an independent investigation constituted a violation of Israel's responsibilities under international law and charged that the Israeli military had a history "of failures to investigate suspicions of serious crimes and illegitimate officer orders."

Israel launched its "Operation Cast Lead" on December 27, in response to repeated rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip on its southern towns and villages.

During the campaign, which began with a week of heavy air strikes before the ground troops entered the enclave, 1,417 Palestinians were killed and over 5,000 were wounded, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said.

The Israeli army said 1,166 Palestinians died in the offensive, adding it had collected their names and that 709 of them were militants. (dpa)