Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday he assumed full responsibility for failures highlighted in a report last week by a government-appointed commission into the 2006 Lebanon war. "The Winograd Commission said what it had to say, and what it said was very harsh. I bear full responsibility for all the failures -- I never tried to shirk that," Olmert told an extraordinary session of parliament that convened to discuss the report. "I will use this responsibility to fix mistakes, and this is what I have been doing since the day after the war ended," he said.Olmert justified his decision to launch a war against the Lebanese Shiite militant movement Hezbollah on July 12, 2006 after the Islamists seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid from south Lebanon. "The decision to fight a war was the correct one... Its objective was to remove Hezbollah from the frontier area and push it back northwards... The objectives were reasonable," Olmert said.
The premier said UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended the 34-day conflict was a success for Israel. "The army has undergone a dramatic overhaul," he said. "The army of February 2008 is a new and better-prepared force."
Olmert's speech to the Knesset had to be interrupted when he was heckled by both MPs and relatives of fallen soldiers, seated in the public gallery. Parliament speaker Dalia Yitzik ordered the relatives to be removed from the chamber, and also that an MP from the opposition right-wing Likud party be ejected. Outside the building several hundred demonstrators, among them army reservists, demanded Olmert's resignation. It was protests by reservists after the war that led public opinion to demand the commission of inquiry.
Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, himself a former prime minister, told parliament the war had been a failure and that Olmert should step down "because he bears sole responsibility. Would the captain of the Titanic have been given another command?"
After the rowdy session the 120-seat parliament approved Olmert's statement to the house by 59 votes for and 53 against, with one abstention. In its final report, published last Wednesday, the Winograd Commission refrained from the harsh language it used for Olmert in its interim findings nine months previously that blasted the premier for "serious failure."
It placed most of the blame on the military and said Olmert had acted in what he sincerely believed to have been the country's best interest. Both defence minister Amir Peretz and military chief of staff Dan Halutz resigned after the war in which 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed. The toll in Lebanon was more than 1,200 dead -- mostly civilians.