 Prime Minister Ehud Olmert denied yesterday that Israel had aimed to destroy the Hezbollah Shiite militant group during the monthlong Lebanon war.
“The government made a decision on the 12th of July. They never said the goal was to destroy Hezbollah.
| "Livni, see? Not the government. It wasn't me, really." |
It was to implement UN Resolution 1559, to have the Lebanese Army in the south and that was achieved,” he said here.
| "So, y'see, really we did what we set out to do..." |
UN Resolution 1559, adopted by the UN Security Council in September 2004, called for all foreign troops to leave Lebanon and for all militias there to disband.
| Hezbollah hasn't disbanded... |
Olmert spoke a day after he admitted for the first time to “failures” during the 34-day offensive against Hezbollah. “It is true that not everything worked as we wished. We were not ready. We did not always achieve the aims we hoped for. Not everything worked properly. There were problems and failures,” he said late Monday in the northern port of Haifa. When Israel launched the Lebanon offensive on July 12, it said the main aims were to recover two soldiers captured by Hezbollah the same day in cross-border raids, which left eight other troops dead, and to prevent the group from firing rockets into Israel. The two Israeli soldiers remain missing and Hezbollah pummeled northern Israel with rockets right up to Aug. 14, when a UN-brokered cease-fire came into force on the ground. |