JERUSALEM, April 30 — An Israeli government commission excoriated Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday for “severe failures” in last summer’s war against the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, setting off a furious debate on whether he should remain in office

The commission accused him of having decided hastily to go to war, neglecting to ask for a detailed military plan, refusing to consult outside the army and setting “over-ambitious and unobtainable goals.”



One result, the commission said, was that Mr. Olmert had been responsible for “a severe failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence.”



Mr. Olmert appeared briefly on Monday night on Israeli television and radio to say that “it would not be right for me to resign and I will not do so.” Instead, he said, he would appoint a team to study the report fully and carry out its recommendations, and he praised the commission for its work. “Failures will be remedied,” he said.



The commission’s language was harsher than Israelis had been led to expect from a series of leaks, although the report, which limited itself to the first five days of the war, did not call on Mr. Olmert to resign. A second part of the report, on the rest of the war, is to be published this summer.



The commission’s findings nonetheless reduce Mr. Olmert’s chances of recovering already badly damaged political credibility.



The commission also sharply criticized the defense minister, Amir Peretz of the Labor Party, whose career is already in tatters, and the chief of staff at the time, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, who has already resigned.



“We single out these three because it is likely that had any of them acted better, the decisions in the relevant period and the ways they were made, as well as the outcome of the war, would have been significantly better,” the report said. But it also made clear that “the prime minister bears supreme and comprehensive responsibility for the decisions of his government and the operations of the army.”



After militants from Hezbollah crossed into Israel last July, killing three Israeli soldiers and seizing two others, Israel retaliated with a ground and aerial assault, vowing to destroy Hezbollah’s military infrastructure.



Hezbollah launched thousands of rockets at northern Israel, while Israel pounded southern Lebanon. The fighting lasted for 34 days, and Hezbollah was widely portrayed as surviving the conflict relatively intact.



The commission, led by a retired judge, Eliyahu Winograd, was appointed by the Olmert government, but it pulled few punches. “Only one sentence is missing” about Mr. Olmert, said Amnon Abramovitch, a respected commentator on Israel’s Channel 2 television — that “this being the case, he cannot continue in his post.”



Despite Mr. Olmert’s vow to continue in office, a cabinet minister who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the matter said, “This isn’t over yet.” With an antigovernment demonstration scheduled for Thursday, the minister said, “the next 48 hours will be crucial.”



He said he expected, since no one in the government wanted new elections, that Mr. Olmert would try to use the next three months “to see if he can correct matters,” with the help of a new finance minister and a new defense minister — perhaps Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, or Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Shin Bet security service, either of whom seems able to defeat Mr. Peretz next month for the Labor Party leadership.



Israel’s finance minister, Abraham Hirchson, is temporarily on leave as the police investigate allegations of embezzlement from before he joined the government, only one of several continuing inquiries into the government and Mr. Olmert.



Miri Eisin, Mr. Olmert’s spokeswoman, noted that the prime minister and the army had already begun reforms in the defense structure and in military training and procedures.



Mr. Olmert’s coalition government of the center and left has a large majority in Parliament, and if he were replaced, it would most likely be an internal move, without new elections.



Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a conservative research institute here, said that “given historical precedent, no government has been able to survive the disillusionment of the Israeli people.



“Whatever option he chooses short of resignation is futile,” he said.



Israelis have a grudging respect for Mr. Olmert for deciding to go to war, which they supported, Mr. Halevi said. “But they knew the war was a failure,” he added. “The question is why we didn’t win the war. It’s a question of competence.”



The use of the word “severe” by the commission, he said, will be taken by the Israeli public as “an implicit call for Olmert to resign.”



Arye Carmon, the president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a liberal research organization, said that the commission had gone too far into politics, and that its conclusions may push the government “into preparing for the last war, not the next one.”“Unfortunately,” he said, “Israeli democracy has been caught up in a culture of investigating committees. It leaves the public passive and ignites another ill phenomenon — a terrible deterioration of public trust in public institutions.”



Mr. Carmon doubted there would be a large political outcry, in part because of the lack of clear alternatives to Mr. Olmert as prime minister and a reluctance to reward the political right wing.



Asher Arian, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and a political scientist with the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said the report also laid blame on the cabinet and the system, and therefore may have “pulled its punches” with “too broad an indictment.”



The report must be seen in the context of tough Israeli politics, Mr. Arian said. “No one wants elections now, and that gives Olmert his real safety net,” he said.



In three months, when the next part of the report comes out, it will seem even more like Monday morning quarterbacking, Mr. Arian said, “and Olmert may be in negotiations with the Palestinians.”



He, like others, noted that the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, had not been mentioned in this first report, even though she is also a deputy prime minister. She has complained that Mr. Olmert consulted little with others in the early days of the war; he has complained that she was a reluctant bystander and was not fully supportive.



While Ms. Livni did not criticize Mr. Olmert openly during the war, she and her staff have made it clear since then that she favored an early halt to the fighting, to move toward a quicker diplomatic resolution.



Ms. Livni is the most likely beneficiary if Mr. Olmert does resign or if their party, Kadima, forces him out, but Mr. Arian said that she must not be seen to be “raising a knife.” Some in Kadima would rather change prime ministers after the second part of the report comes out, to try to have a fresher start.



The report also lambasted the defense minister, Mr. Peretz, a former trade union leader, for what it called his inexperience and lack of curiosity, his lack of strategic vision and his failure to press General Halutz and the army for options, details and the nature of its own internal debate.



Still, the report concluded by describing the failures of previous governments and commanders to keep the army in a state of readiness, in part because of an assumption that “Israel is beyond the era of wars” and could rely on deterrence alone. “The conclusion was that the main challenge facing the land forces would be low-intensity asymmetrical conflicts,” the report said, like the counterinsurgency tactics used in the Palestinian territories.



The military “was not ready for this war,” it said.



It also recommended a better use of the National Security Council, a better system for crisis management in the prime minister’s office and the “full incorporation” of the Foreign Ministry “in security decisions with political and diplomatic aspects.”

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