NEW YORK — Richard Goldstone said he will not seek to quash his report to the United Nations on Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza, despite his retraction of a key finding.

Reports that he told Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai that he would seek to quash the report prepared at the behest of the UN Human Rights Council are false, Goldstone told Associated Press. The report presented to the council in September 2009 accused Israel of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Goldstone, a former South African judge, wrote in a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post that Israel did not intentionally target civilians as a policy during the Gaza war, withdrawing a critical allegation in his report.

“We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the UN Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone report,” Goldstone wrote. “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a different document.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a host of Israeli officials and organizations have called on the United Nations to cancel the Goldstone report following the publication of the piece .

Goldstone, who is Jewish, said he accepted an invitation from Yishai to visit Israel and tour its southern communities, which have been besieged by Hamas rockets. Yishai said he called Goldstone to thank him for his reassessment and to invite him to visit the country. Goldstone will visit Israel in July as a guest of Yishai.

In related developments, a group of American Jewish lawyers is set to file a civil lawsuit against Goldstone initiated by Israeli lawmaker Danny Danon.

The class action suit is set to be filed next week in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan by attorney Steve Goldberg, according to a statement issued last Wednesday from Danon’s office.

Danon met with the attorneys during a recent visit to the United States, the statement said. It gave no further information on Goldberg or the other attorneys involved in the suit.

The lawsuit will demand that Goldstone publicly apologize to the State of Israel and pay a symbolic amount of damages for the charges he made in the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict report.

“The Goldstone report is nothing less than a modern version of the infamous blood libels against the Jewish people,” Danon said. “The distorted image that Judge Goldstone spread about Israel and the Israel Defence Forces has caused immeasurable damage to our citizens, and it will continue to do so for many years to come. I call on Goldstone to publicly apologize for his erroneous report with the hope that perhaps this will begin to repair some of the immense damage that has been inflicted on the international standing of the State of Israel.”

The Jerusalem Post reported that Danon said he plans to file a similar lawsuit in Israel that would go into effect if Goldstone visits the Jewish state, as he plans to do in July.