Senior reserve officers, angry over military failures during the month-long war against Hezbollah, unleashed a torrent of criticism in the media against Halutz ahead of a planned meeting next week.
"The difference between objectives that were fixed and those that were achieved are enormous," Reserve General Uri Sagi, a former chief of military intelligence, told public radio. "It is obvious to me that the chief of staff [Halutz] is responsible for everything," Sagi told the left-leaning Ha'aretz newspaper.
Israel unleashed its 34-day offensive on Hezbollah July 12, vowing to retrieve two soldiers seized by the Shiite militant group in a cross-border raid the same day and to stop it from firing rockets into the Jewish state.
But the soldiers remain missing and Hezbollah pummeled northern Israel with nearly 4,000 rockets that killed 41 civilians right up to August 14, when a UN-brokered truce took effect on the ground.
Although all of Israel's leadership, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government, has come under fire for the campaign, the 58-year-old chief of the armed forces has been especially castigated.
"We have a lot to say to Halutz," the Ma'ariv daily quoted an unnamed general as saying. "Genuine, honest criticism of the mistakes and errors made in the course of the war, some of them crucial."
The charges against Halutz include an over-reliance on air power early in the campaign, indecisiveness, confusing orders, lack of preparation, and shortages of food and water for some troops.
"The officers were angry over what they viewed as Halutz's arrogance, and his dismissing the views of the northern command, of the various ground forces and even those of IDF [Israel Defense Force] intelligence," Ma'ariv wrote.
On the personal front, Halutz has come under fire for misplaced priorities after revelations that he sold a stock portfolio hours before Israel unleashed its offensive in Lebanon.
"The [man] responsible for the failures is the one who thought that it was possible to finish everything only with airstrikes, the one who thought it was possible to ignore ground forces," national infrastructure minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told army radio earlier this week.
"I think very highly of General Halutz - he is the best air force chief that we have ever had - but I think that he completely failed" in the Lebanon war, said Ben-Eliezer, a reserve general, former defense minister, and member of Israel's security cabinet.
In an open letter to the army last week, Halutz, who has so far resisted calls for his resignation, admitted for the first time to failures during the war.
"Parallel with our success, during combat we observed failures in certain areas, notably in the areas of logistics, operations, and command," he wrote.
Meanwhile the families of the two soldiers seized by Hezbollah in the July 12 raid that sparked the offensive along with the family of a conscript snatched by Gaza militants in late June piled pressure on the government to secure the release of the servicemen.
The families, who have met with Israeli and international politicians in efforts to free their relatives, appealed for supporters to turn out en masse for a solidarity rally in Tel Aviv late Thursday.
© 2006 Agence France-Presse
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