Ehud Olmert announced last night: “The Government, headed by myself, will appoint an investigative committee. The committee will be charged with examining the Government’s functioning in taking decisions and all that it sees as fit.”

He said that he had no wish to expose the army, heavily criticised for its performance, to a full-blooded and drawn-out inquiry. Instead, the military would have to carry out its own internal investigation.

Mr Olmert had been under pressure to appoint a full state commission but that would have paralysed the Government and military and possibly ended in impeachment proceedings against him.

Mr Olmert, Amir Peretz, the Defence Minister, and Dan Halutz, the Israeli army chief, have faced intense criticism over the conduct of the war against Hezbollah, which has been widely characterised as a failure. At least 57 per cent of Israelis wanted Mr Olmert to set up a state commission, Mina Tzemach, the head of Dahaf, an opinion pollster, said.

Hillel Sommer, a law lecturer at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Centre, said: “I don’t think there’s a critical mass of people supporting a full-fledged commission. If the Government appoints an investigative committee that’s not biased and has no doubts over its integrity . . . that will be enough for now.”

Reservists returning from Lebanon and the bereaved families of some of the 117 soldiers killed in the fighting have been the backbone of protests. Arik Horowitz, 27, a reservist from Be’er Sheva who joined the camps opposite the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, said: “The truth has to come out before we attach blame. A commission headed by a judge is the only way to achieve that.”

Mr Olmert will now have greater flexibility in drawing the parameters of an investigative committee that he hopes might be sufficient to blunt public dissent. It will also conclude its inquiry much more speedily.

However, one of Mr Olmert’s senior ministers yesterday blamed Lieutenant-General Halutz solely for Israel’s failure to stop Hezbollah missiles and rescue two kidnapped soldiers.

Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the National Infrastructure Minister and a reserve general, said: “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 . . . He completely failed.”

In Beirut, Kofi Annan, the United Nations’ Secretary-General, on a whistle-stop Middle East tour to strengthen the fragile ceasefire, called on Israel to end its blockade of Lebanon and urged Hezbollah to release kidnapped Israeli soldiers.

Mr Annan, who met Fouad Siniora, the Lebanese Prime Minister, called for the full implementation of the terms of the UN ceasefire resolution — that Israel withdraws from southern Lebanon and the Lebanese army and international peacekeepers are deployed.

As Mr Annan toured Beirut’s devastated suburbs, he was met by an angry crowd chanting pro-Hezbollah slogans and waving pictures of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader.

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