Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, appeared today to have emerged relatively unscathed from a long-awaited report into the failures of the 2006 Lebanon war.

Eliyahu Winograd, the retired judge who headed the Winograd Commission, instead placed much of the blame for the outcome of the 30-day conflict on senior figures within the defence and military establishments, almost all of whom have already resigned.

The commission delivered a damning judgment on the war as a whole - including on a controversial last-minute ground offensive ordered only 60 hours before a UN ceasefire resolution was due to come into effect and which cost an extra 30 soldiers' lives.

But it said that Mr Olmert had given an "honest assessment" of Israel's interests even though the war had been an overall failure. A total of 120 Israeli soldiers and around 1,000 Lebanese civilians and fighters died during the conflict.

It had been widely accepted that direct criticism of Mr Olmert could have brought down his fragile coalition government, effectively ending hope of progress in the peace process with the Palestinians.

Tonight, with the Prime Minister having avoided personal censure, his aides said that they were confident of his survival.

"Overall, we regard the second Lebanon war as a serious missed opportunity," Mr Winograd said, giving his findings.

"We found serious failings and shortcomings in the decision-making processes and staff-work in the political and the military echelons.

"We found severe failings and flaws in the lack of strategic thinking and planning, in both the political and the military echelons."

"The way the original decision to go to war had been made; the fact Israel went to war before it decided which option to select and without an exit strategy - all these constituted serious failures, which affected the whole war."

"Responsibility for these failures lay, as we had stressed in the interim report, on both the political and the military echelons."

Critically, however, some of the commission's worst criticisms were directed towards the military leadership, rather than politicians.

The impact of these criticisms, however, was blunted because of the resignation of Dan Halutz, Israel's chief of staff at the time, last year, along with the then-Defence Minister Amir Peretz.

"We found serious failures and shortcomings in the highest level of the military command, especially in the ground forces, the quality of deployment, preparedness, launching and implementation of decisions and orders," he said.

Crucially, however, it added that the Prime Minister was not personally culpable. "We believe that both the Prime Minister and Defence Minister acted from the point of view that what they decided was in the interest of the state of Israel," it said.

Mr Olmert's aides immediately pounced on the report to indicate that he would not call early elections. One aide told the AFP news agency: "The criticism in this report is much more moderate that the previous interim report. We are satisfied with it."

In the run-up to the commission's statement, they had been concerned that the criticism would go farther than that levelled at the 62-year-old in an interim report eight months ago. That found Mr Olmert and his senior political and military colleagues guilty of severe failures in the war launched after Hezbollah launched a cross-border raid in July 2006.

Israel responded to the killings and abductions of its soldiers with an air war that failed to stem the rocket fire from Hezbollah. The heavy death toll among soldiers and civilians in the 33-day conflict, and the inconclusive result of the war, led to a deep crisis within Israel's military and political classes.

Aides to the Prime Minister have pointed out that international peacekeepers who were deployed after the conflict have kept Hezbollah rockets away from the border, giving northern Israel 16 months of unprecedented peace.

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