A former general with years of experience fighting Lebanon's
Hezbollah 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 Defense Ministry, will replace Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz
who quit last week over his failure to crush Hezbollah in the
July-August war.
An aide to Defence Minister Amir Peretz said announcement of the
appointment was likely later in the day. In a speech after the
reports Ashkenazy had been tapped, Peretz did not mention a
candidate but said a new military chief would be chosen
quickly.
Ashkenazy served extensively in southern Lebanon and headed the
army's northern command in the final years before Israeli troops,
after constant attacks by Hezbollah fighters, withdrew in 2000.
Israeli media said Ashkenazy had in effect won the job after his
leading rival for the post, deputy chief of staff Moshe Kaplinsky,
wrote a letter to Peretz dropping out of the race.
Halutz, a former air force chief, tendered his resignation after
months of public criticism of the military's failure to defeat
Hezbollah, retrieve two captured soldiers or halt rocket attacks on
the Jewish state during last summer's 34-day war.
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 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.
Ashkenazy, passed over in 2005 for the chief of staff post in
favor of Halutz, is a veteran infantry commander who also trained
in the tank corps.
Conscripted in 1972, Ashkenazy saw his first military action in
the Sinai Peninsula against Egyptian troops in the 1973 Middle East
War.
As a platoon leader in 1976, Ashkenazy 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.
Ashkenazy was named northern command chief in 1998, two years
before Israeli troops, under frequent attack by Hezbollah, withdrew
from southern Lebanon. He was appointed deputy chief of staff in
2002 but retired from the army after Halutz beat him to the top
job.
(China Daily January 23, 2007)
