ISRAEL:A former general with years of experience fighting Lebanon's Hizbullah guerrillas has been chosen as the new chief of Israel's armed forces, Israeli media reported yesterday.
Gaby Ashkenazy (52), an infantry commander and currently director of the defence ministry, will replace Lieut-Gen Dan Halutz, who resigned last week over his failure to crush Hizbullah in last year's July-August war.
Gen Ashkenazy served extensively in southern Lebanon and headed the army's northern command in the final years before Israeli troops, after constant attacks by Hizbullah fighters, withdrew in 2000.
Israeli media said Gen Ashkenazy had in effect won the job after his leading rival for the post, deputy chief of staff Moshe Kaplinsky, wrote a letter to defence minister Amir Peretz, dropping out of the race.
Gen Halutz, a former air force chief, tendered his resignation after months of public criticism of the military's failure to defeat Hizbullah, retrieve two captured soldiers or halt rocket attacks on the Jewish state during last summer's 34-day war.
Gen Ashkenazy was not in uniform during the fighting, in which some 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 157 Israelis, most of them soldiers, were killed.
He was widely seen as a safe candidate to replace Gen Halutz ahead of the preliminary findings, expected in several months, of a government-appointed panel examining the handling of the war by Israeli leaders and military commanders.
Gen Halutz has been heavily criticised by Israeli military affairs correspondents over what they described as his over-reliance on air power against Hizbullah.
Gen Ashkenazy, passed over in 2005 for the chief-of-staff post in favour of Gen Halutz, is a veteran infantry commander who also trained in the tank corps.
Conscripted in 1972, he saw his first military action in the Sinai peninsula against Egyptian troops in the 1973 Middle East war. As a platoon leader in 1976, he took part in Operation Entebbe, an Israeli commando raid in Uganda that rescued passengers held by Palestinian and German hijackers of an Air France flight that originated in Tel Aviv.
He served as a deputy brigade commander in the 1982 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon and headed the elite Golani infantry brigade from 1994 to 1996.
He was named northern command chief in 1998 and appointed deputy chief of staff in 2002, but retired from the army after Gen Halutz beat him for the top job.