Netanyahu goes on the offensive: Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu issued a scathing attack on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert Thursday evening and called on Defense Minister Ehud Barak to deliver on an earlier promise and quit the government.
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"The prime minister is dodging responsibility. Responsibility means doing what the army chief and defense minister did," Netanyahu said at a press conference convened at Likud headquarters in Tel Aviv in the wake of the Winograd report's publication.
"The prime minister is unfit and unworthy to lead," the Likud leader said. "Barak knows this too, and the public expects him to deliver on his promise not to continue. Who would put himself in the hands of a doctor who performed a failed surgery? Who would board a bus whose driver was recently involved in a fatal accident?"
Unprecedented support
Netanyahu added that never before has an Israeli government embarked on a war with such broad national and international support, noting that even opposition members enlisted for the cause and defended Israel on the international stage.
"Never before has Israel embarked on a war while holding such big advantages over the enemy facing it," Netanyahu said. "Never, since the War of Independence, was a government given so much time in order to win on the battlefield. Yet despite these advantages, as the Winograd Commission ruled, for the first time in Israel's wars, we had a war…which Israel initiated and ended without winning it."
However, in wake of the Winograd report, which largely absolved Olmert over the decision to embark on the war's final ground operation, the momentum for promoting his ousting seems to have been curbed. Labor party Knesset Members Eitan Cabel and Ophir Pines called on the prime minister to quit, but Labor officials estimate that the party will stay in the coalition.
_a.jpg "Photo: Yaron Brener")
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