The final report of the official inquiry into the 2006 Second Lebanon War is expected to accuse PM Ehud Olmert of having caused 33 pointless IDF deaths in the last 60 hours of warfare. The Winograd Commission was appointed a month after the end of the war, as a result of heavy public pressure and criticism of the war's poor results. The commission's mandate was to investigate the errors in running the war. It had been announced of late that the commission would not call for Olmert's resignation - but the Sunday Times of London now reports that it is likely to come close: The commission will sharply censor the Prime Minister for the battles of the war's last three days, in which 28 soldiers were killed in battle and another five were killed when their helicopter was shot down.
In the final 60 hours of fighting, Israel launched a major ground offensive which began while the United Nations was nearing a ceasefire resolution. Though some would say that Olmert wished to seize a victory from the jaws of defeat, or at least end the war with Israel in its best possible position, the Winograd Commission sees the situation differently.
The British paper quotes a "source close to the Winograd Commission" saying that Olmert, "aware that a ceasefire agreement was underway, ordered the army to carry out an impossible operation to wind up a failed war against Hizbullah with a big showdown." Another source told the Times: “My hunch is that the report will blame Olmert in the harshest way possible, and the last 60 hours of the war will be the hook on which they hang him.”
The paper reports that the final operation of the war, codenamed Direction Change 11, was launched on August 11, 2006, as the final details of a ceasefire were being hammered out in New York. The ceasefire went into effect on Monday, Aug. 14. “This was the operation the army had planned for months – to crack down decisively and finish off Hizbullah,” the Times quoted an officer as saying. “But it should have begun the war, not ended it and we needed 96 hours to trap Hezbollah and then a week to finish them off.”
The Commission may take its lead from an Israeli book on the war by journalists Ofer Shelah and Yoav Limor, which recounts a phone conversation between Olmert and former Defense Minister Sha'ul Mofaz. Olmert reportedly tells Mofaz that an "excellent proposal has been agreed in the security council, exactly what we wanted" - but still insists on continuing the offensive. When Mofaz asks, “What are you going to say to the families of the soldiers who will die in this pointless operation?,” Olmert reportedly responds, “Well, that’s a tough one... I don’t think I’ve got a good answer.”
The Times does not note that Mofaz himself was the only Cabinet minister not to vote in favor of the ceasefire proposal.
Arutz-7 asked ex-IDF Ground Forces Commander Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Yiftah Ron-Tal if criticism of Olmert for waging an offensive in the shadow of an approaching ceasefire would deter future Israeli leaders from ordering strong offensives when necesssary. "I do not believe so," Ron-Tal said. "I trust that Israeli leaders know their responsibility, and will do what is necessary - but they must do so with the proper mechanisms in place to ensure that their actions are of value. In this case, there was no way that there could have been enough time for the final offensive to succeed. It was carried out without proper coordination between the government and the army, and it was such a large-scale offensive - with three divisions, over a large area, etc. - that it simply could not have succeeded under those conditions."
Gen. Ron-Tal, who retired from active service shortly before the war began, was asked what he felt was the major blunder in the way the war was run. After saying that there had been no coordinated ground campaign, he said that the main errors were that the objectives were not properly defined; the actions that were taken - including air raids and isolated ground attacks - did not match the objectives; and the coordination was poor and even non-existent.
Though Hizbullah's long-range Katyusha rockets were destroyed by the Israeli air campaign, Ron-Tal said, "the short-range rockets were not; it is unbelievable that even on the last day of fighting, 100 Katyushas were still being fired at northern Israel!"
The 33 soldiers who were killed during the last weekend of the war included eight infantrymen hit by Hizbullah anti-tank rockets in three different incidents, an officer killed by a mortar shell, and two killed by anti-tank fire just hours before the ceasefire took effect. In addition, three tanks, and their crews, were destroyed by rockets. Over 50 Hizbullah terrorists were reported killed over that weekend, and more were presumably killed in the last 24 hours of warfare. Katyusha rockets continued to rain down upon Israel over that last weekend; public radio broadcasts were continually interrupted every 3-4 minutes with news of sirens in different localities, accompanied by Home Front Command instructions directing residents to take cover.