On July 11, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz picked up the phone and called a hotel in the North to make a reservation for a family vacation. Two days before that, OC Northern Command Maj.-Gen. Udi Adam held a security assessment at headquarters in Safed and decided to lower the level of alert along the northern border, raised two weeks earlier following the kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Shalit in the Gaza Strip.

IAF fighter jets prepare for take-off.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski

On July 12, however, Halutz's plans for a vacation went down the drain and instead of going up north to relax, the chief of staff flew up to direct Israel's war against Hizbullah. Two reservists had been kidnapped in a cross-border attack and the government had decided to launch a military offensive in Lebanon.

The decision itself was a major shift in Israeli policy. Since the IDF's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, Israel has largely restrained itself in the face of Hizbullah provocations. The kidnapping of three soldiers in 2000, as well as the attempted kidnapping in December 2005, all went unanswered by Israel and Hizbullah guerrillas were still allowed to maintain their outposts just a stone's throw away from the northern border. This time however, the "Zimmer Policy," according to which Israel turned a blind eye to the Hizbullah buildup as long as the zimmers and hotels in the North were full, was discarded and Israel went to war.

There is no doubt that Israel was completely taken by surprise by the kidnappings of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser on July 12. Halutz claims that he ordered the Northern Command already back in March to begin preparing for an escalation with Hizbullah in the summer of 2006. In June, the Northern Command held a massive exercise during which it drilled scenarios following the kidnapping of IDF soldiers by Hizbullah, including a massive invasion into Lebanon. Nevertheless, Halutz's call to reserve hotel rooms in the North and Adam's decision to lower the level of alert point in a different direction.

But the lack of intelligence was not the only mistake made throughout the month of fighting in Lebanon. Defense Minister Amir Peretz quickly set up an inquiry commission - led by former chief of staff Lt.-Gen. (res.) Amnon Lipkin-Shahak - to investigate the IDF's management of the war. But that panel has now suspended its work as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert deliberates the establishment of another commission, possibly state-appointed.

These are some of the issues whichever commission is ultimately appointed will have to deal with.

IDF Reserve officers.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski [file]

Ground Invasion
While there were many disagreements throughout the entire month of fighting, on a whole, the top IDF brass admit that there has never been such a willing and supportive political echelon as the Ehud Olmert-Amir Peretz duo.

On July 12, several hours after the kidnapping, Halutz went to the cabinet and presented the IDF's air campaign, which included strikes on Beirut's International Airport, as a possible response. To the IDF's surprise, the cabinet immediately approved the plan.

But the air raids quickly exhausted themselves and it became clear that Hizbullah would not be sufficiently weakened by air. Instead, the IDF began launching pinpoint raids into Hizbullah strongholds such as Bint Jbail and Maroun a-Ras along the northern border. Those also proved to be ineffective. Dozens of soldiers were killed and Hizbullah continued to succeed in firing over 100 rockets a day at northern Israel. The next natural step was to launch a larger-scale ground invasion. But something delayed both a ground invasion, and the call-up of reservist forces.

This is where the versions become conflicting. Version A: Adam claims that he was ready at the end of July to launch a widespread ground invasion into Lebanon and that for two weeks troops milled outside Lebanon awaiting orders. Troops inside Lebanon were also frozen in place and, according to frustrated brigade commanders, the lack of movement put the forces on the defensive and gave the upper hand to Hizbullah fighters.

Version B: Sources in the General Staff claim that it was in fact Adam who was hesitant in launching the massive ground operation. He was scared, they said, of the results. There was also Halutz, who for the first three weeks of the war repeated in closed-door meetings that he was opposed to a ground invasion, and that he would only recommend one if there proved to be no alternative. The heavy loss of life in Bint Jbail and Maroun a-Ras also assisted in reducing the support for such an invasion.

Then there is Version C: Olmert's version. He claims that the first time he saw a plan to invade Lebanon with tens of thousands of troops was the day before the plan was approved by the cabinet on August 9. (That contradicts Adam's version that the force was in place already by August 1.)

Factually, Olmert might be telling the truth, and it could be that he only saw the plan on a map laid out on his desk at the Prime Minister's Office on August 8, but he was certainly familiar with such a plan way before then. Indeed, Peretz ordered the IDF on August 3 to begin preparing for a large-scale incursion and an advance to the Litani River - 40 kilometers into Lebanon - in a bid to gain control of Katyusha launch sites.

Logically, the Litani Plan made sense and high-ranking members of the General Staff were already pushing it in the first weeks of war. According to Military Intelligence, close to 70 percent of the rockets raining down on Israel were fired from areas just south and north of the Litani River.

It was in these parts south of the Litani that Hizbullah's elite Nasser Unit was waiting with thousands of troops and functioning command and control centers in underground bunkers, spread out in some 130 villages, laying mines, ambushes and just sitting and waiting for the Israeli tanks to come rolling in. Only a ground presence there, IDF officers claimed, could have curbed the rockets.

But when the push to the Litani finally began, it no longer made much sense due to the looming cease-fire. On Friday August 11, the United Nations Security Council convened and approved a French and American-backed cease-fire resolution. Despite the decision, the IDF pressed forward with its invasion and in some of the fiercest fighting during the war, 12 soldiers and some 80 Hizbullah gunmen were killed as a tank column suffered numerous hits from Hizbullah-fired anti-tank missiles as it tried crossing the Saluki Stream.