By Xinhua
Jerusalem : The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) on Monday issued a report on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in 2006, criticizing the Israeli army’s performance in the war.
According to Israeli media, the committee condemned the senior Israel Defense Forces (IDF) command in unusually severe terms, saying that the army’s methods of fighting played into the hands of Hezbollah.
In failing to mount a broad ground onslaught until the end of the war, the military failed to achieve the war’s central operative objective, that is, combating Hezbollah’s Katyusha rocket fire, Israeli daily Ha’aretz’s website quoted the report assaying.
The report doesn’t comment on the role of the government in directing the war, but levies criticism on its decisions.
Ha’aretz quoted the report as saying that the policy of restraint which successive Israeli governments pursued following the year 2000 IDF withdrawal from south Lebanon “brought the army to a state of paralysis and slackness.”
The report then strongly criticizes the government for having delayed ordering a ground offensive until the final stages of the war.
The 150-page report examines the military and political decisions that were made from the war’s first day, July 12, 2006, through the 34 days it lasted, to the end of it on Aug. 14 when a UN-brokered ceasefire went into effect.
According to Ha’aretz, all 17 members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee signed their names on the report, which the panel started to compile in September 2006, a few weeks after the fighting came to an end.
Most of the work was done by its classified subcommittees.
The war began when Hezbollah militants fired rockets at Israeli border towns as a diversion for a cross-border raid, during which several Israeli soldiers were killed and two were kidnapped by Hezbollah militants.
During the 34-day fighting, Israel launched massive airstrikes on targets in Lebanon, and organized large-scale ground invasion into southern Lebanon at the final stage of the war.
Hezbollah then launched thousands of rockets into northern Israel and engaged the IDF in guerrilla warfare from hardened positions.
The conflict killed more than a thousand people, most of whom were Lebanese civilians.
In addition to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee report, another war-probe panel, the Winograd Committee, is also due to publish its final report on Israel-Hezbollah conflict in the coming weeks.
The Winograd Committee, which was appointed by the government, issued its interim report in April.
The report led to the resignation of the former Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz, former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, and sparked calls for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to step down.