Israeli PM says Lebanon war was pre-planned: report

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - 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 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.

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 chairman of parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense 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 ($118 million) from the defense 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".