Allegations continue to mount that Israeli soldiers systematically committed war crimes during the 22-day military offensive in Gaza.

Following leaked testimony from Israeli soldiers who said their comrades killed civilians in Gaza, the United Nations has issued a new report prepared by human rights investigators who said they unearthed scores of questionable incidents.

The UN report said Israeli soldiers used an 11-year-old boy as a human shield, shelled a building after moving Palestinian civilians inside a day earlier, and used a bulldozer to bring another building down on top of a woman and child.

Along with the UN report, The Guardian has published an extensive report on alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

The Guardian stories and video reports focused on evidence that Israeli soldiers used Palestinians as human shields and that Israeli drones killed two dozen Gazans during the offensive.

The Israeli military is looking into specific allegations raised by its own soldiers. But the IDF continues to categorically dismiss allegations raised by the UN, human rights groups and others.

Later this week, Human Rights Watch is planning to release its report on the Israeli military's controversial use of white phosphorus during the military operation.

As The New York Times recently noted, Israel is grappling with a "crisis of isolation" created by the Gaza offensive.

The NYT called it Israel's "worst diplomatic crisis in two decades."

Haaretz blogger Bradley Burston poses the question: "Why does the world media love to hate Israel?"

"Anyone who has been in a war, as a participant, reporter, or civilian bystander, knows that any war, every war, spawns war crimes," Burston writes. "The question, when examining the Cast Lead operation in Gaza, was whether there was something different, something exceptional and intentional and, especially, a matter of policy and command direction, that either trapped or targeted large numbers of civilians, resulting in a human tragedy far beyond the horrible reality of the very fact of warfare. Was, in other words, this war different from all other wars? Or was this war the trigger for an outpouring of anti-Israel animus that was, for lack of a better term, disproportionate? Although the jury is still out pending further independent inquiry, the likely answer to both is: Yes."

For the moment, Israeli leaders continue to reject increasing calls for independent investigations of the events in Gaza.

As Jeffrey Goldberg recently noted on his blog at The Atlantic:

"The crucial question is, how should a civilized country behave when confronting barbarism? With barbarism? Or with respect for innocent life? Pardon me for saying so, but the Jewish people didn't struggle for national equality, justice and freedom so that some of its sons could behave like Cossacks. Please don't get me wrong: I'm not equating the morality of the IDF to that of Hamas. The goal of Hamas is to murder innocent people; the goal of the IDF is to avoid murdering innocent people. But when the IDF fails to achieve its goal, and ends up inflicting needless destruction and suffering, it sullies not only its own name, but the name of the Jewish state. It risks making a just cause -- Jewish nationhood -- seem unjust, and it ultimately endangers what it is supposed to protect."