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Lebanon war was 'pre-planned'
08/03/2007 17:23 - (SA)
Jerusalem - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert has testified he launched last year's war against
Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon in line with a contingency plan he
had approved four months before, the Haaretz daily said on Thursday.
Olmert, under fire for his handling of the inconclusive
34-day war, told a judicial inquiry last month that Hezbollah's
capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 triggered the plans
for a large-scale attack in Lebanon, the Israeli newspaper said.
The inquiry, known as the Winograd Commission, is expected
to publish an interim report this month. Haaretz did not say how
it had learned the details of Olmert's February 1 testimony.
Many Israelis view Olmert's decision to go to war as a
knee-jerk reaction by a leader with little security experience,
unlike his predecessor, former general Ariel Sharon.
In testimony apparently aimed at dismissing any notion he
acted recklessly, Olmert told the commission he asked army
commanders in March 2006 if a contingency plan for military
action existed in the event soldiers were abducted along the
Lebanon frontier, Haaretz said. 'Moderate plan'
Presented with options, Olmert chose what the newspaper
described as a "moderate plan" that included air strikes
accompanied by a limited ground operation.
Opposition Likud party lawmaker Yuval Steinitz, who was
chair of parliament's foreign affairs and defence committee
until mid-May 2006, said the Haaretz report had astounded him.
"None of this ever happened," he told Israel Radio. "There
was no intensive preparation for a possible imminent war."
He said Olmert had cut half a billion shekels ($118m)
from the defence budget two months before the conflict, which
was not the action of someone who "believes that in the next few
months they will react to the next provocation with a war".
Olmert and defence minister Amir Peretz have seen their
popularity slump since the war, in which 158 Israelis - including
117 soldiers and 41 civilians - were killed and thousands of
Hezbollah rockets were fired into the Jewish state.
About 1 200 people were killed in Lebanon, including an
estimated 270 Hezbollah fighters. US intervened
In the Lebanon war, Israel failed to achieve its declared
goals of retrieving the two soldiers taken in a cross-border
raid, and destroying the Iranian- and Syrian-backed group's
rocket arsenal and military capacity.
Haaretz said the United States intervened at the outset of
the war to curb the strength of Israel's response and secretary
of state Condoleezza Rice told Israel that Lebanese Prime
Minister Fouad Siniora's government should not be undermined.
"Israel understood this to mean Lebanese infrastructure
should not be destroyed, even though the IDF (Israel defence
forces) had originally planned otherwise," Haaretz said.
Israeli bombing destroyed scores of bridges in Lebanon and
devastated Hezbollah's strongholds in the mainly Shi'ite Muslim
suburbs of Beirut and in the south and east of the country.
A UN-backed truce halted hostilities on August 14. Since
then, Hezbollah fighters have made way for Lebanese army troops
and an expanded UN peacekeeping force to deploy in the south.
Olmert has cited the deployments as an Israeli gain in the war.
- Reuters
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