Middle East:Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert yesterday faced a growing chorus of calls for his resignation as well as the first serious signs of mutiny inside his own ruling Kadima party. These came a day after he received scathing criticism from an inquiry into his handling of the war in Lebanon last summer.
Eitan Cabel, a minister in the government and a member of the centre-left Labor Party, announced yesterday morning he was resigning in the wake of the war report, saying he could no longer serve under Mr Olmert.
As the day wore on, things got worse for the prime minister, with the first members of his own Kadima party publicly calling on him to resign.
There were also reports that his coalition whip, Avigdor Yitzhaki, had spent much of the day meeting party lawmakers to discuss the possibility of ousting Mr Olmert.
Mr Yitzhaki has apparently suggested that a group of lawmakers call on the prime minister to resign at a faction meeting tomorrow.
Small groups of protesters, calling on Mr Olmert and defence minister Amir Peretz to resign, set out on foot from various points across Israel, with the aim of arriving in Tel Aviv for a mass protest scheduled for tomorrow evening.
Some protesters carried banners reading: "Olmert is unworthy; A new start for Israel."
"The public has lost faith in prime minister Ehud Olmert," said Mr Cabel. "I cannot continue to serve as a minister in a government headed by Olmert . . . Ehud Olmert must resign."
Most members of the 29-seat Kadima would prefer to choose someone from within the party to take over from Mr Olmert than go to the polls.
Opinion surveys show former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who heads the hawkish Likud party, with a healthy lead, while they predict electoral meltdown for the ruling party.
While there has been some talk of veteran politician Shimon Peres replacing Mr Olmert if he is forced out, most observers believe that foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who is popular with the public and emerged from the report largely unscathed, is most likely to take over the reins. In potentially the most serious blow to Mr Olmert, Ms Livni told aides "he must go", according to Channel 10 television network last night.
The interim report, which dealt with the decision to launch a military campaign in Lebanon after Hizbullah killed three Israeli soldiers and abducted two more on the northern border in July last year, said Mr Olmert had displayed "a severe failure in judgment, responsibility and caution" in deciding to go to war.
His aims of winning the release of the kidnapped soldiers and destroying Hizbullah, the report continued, were "overly ambitious and impossible to achieve".
For now Mr Olmert seems to be counting on the reluctance of many lawmakers to go to elections, just a year after Israelis were at the polls, as his best chance for survival. Attempting to parry the waves of criticism, Mr Olmert's spokeswoman said yesterday that the prime minister believed he could win back public support.
"He has complete awareness of the lack of public confidence, but he feels that, rather than go into a period of turmoil, he must be the one to fix the problems," said Miri Eisen. "He thinks that through his actions, support will come."
Newspaper headlines yesterday reflected Mr Olmert's dire position. "On the way out," screamed the daily Maariv, while the mass distribution Yediot Ahronoth quoted aides to the prime minister likening the war report to a "gun to the head".
Most political commentators agreed that Mr Olmert's chances of long-term political survival were slim and newspaper editorials called on him to step down.
In an editorial headlined "Immediate resignation", the daily Haaretz wrote that if the prime minister does not resign, "he will be thrown out in a month or two. All this is virtually self- evident from the severity of the findings. If a war broke out tomorrow morning, the present leadership would not have a mandate to lead it."