One of the important issues likely to be decided by the Winograd Committee's interim report on the Second Lebanon War is a dispute that emerged over the abduction of two reservists, Eldad Regev and Udi Goldwasser, on July 12, 2006.

The committee is likely to have the final word in this dispute, between Brigadier General Gal Hirsch, who commanded Division 91 during the war, and the two senior reserve officers who carried out the in-house investigation of the incident: Major General Doron Almog and Brigadier General Pinhas Buchris.

Almog and Buchris blamed the kidnapping on Hirsch, who vociferously rejected their findings. Hirsch, who resigned his command in protest, offered two alternative explanations: Israel's "soft" policy of allowing Hezbollah to occupy positions along the border, which made the abduction easier, and the failure to decipher essential intelligence information in time to prevent the attack against the patrol. The investigators, in contrast, argued that this information was irrelevant and there was no intelligence failure in the incident.

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Amir Oren published a synopsis of this story in Haaretz last September. Military Intelligence (MI) had received clear early hints of a Hezbollah plan to carry out a kidnap attempt, but these were not interpreted correctly and were not sent to the division headquarters. Absent these, the level of preparedness along the border was lowered and patrols were permitted to travel close to the border fence, including in the area where the attack occurred on July 12.

A report in Thursday's Maariv provided further detail: It said that the intelligence officer responsible for analyzing the information was rushed to the Gaza Strip following the abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit on June 25, and his replacement did not comprehend the meaning of these indications. However, only segments of the full story, which has rocked the intelligence community and the senior ranks of Northern Command for months, have reached the media.

The disagreement is also raging within MI itself. On one side are the officers in charge of collecting the information; on the other are Northern Command's intelligence officers - the command's chief intelligence officer and the division's intelligence officer during the war. The officers of MI's research division, who are in charge of analysis, are divided among the two camps.

MI's in-house probe following the kidnapping found more than 30 intelligence items and scraps of information that were relevant to the attack. Almog and Buchris concluded that these were not significant indications and absolved the intelligence collection team. They argued that blaming the intelligence was a retroactive excuse and said that given the large amount of irrelevant information, it was difficult to form an accurate picture in real time.

The disagreement reached its zenith with the release of Almog's report last November and the hearing held for Hirsch following the report. In one session, the chief intelligence officer of Northern Command, Colonel H., said that in his view, any one of seven to ten intelligence reports among the 30 would have been sufficient to establish that "at least there were preparations [being made by Hezbollah], if not an outright warning."

In intelligence terminology, "preparations" is lower on the scale than "warning," but both could lead to defensive preparations in anticipation of an attack. Along the northern border, where substantive intelligence on Hezbollah was always very limited, "preparations" was sufficient to raise the alert level. During the year prior to the abduction, alert levels were raised often, even on the basis of scraps of information. In three or four cases, this sufficed to prevent the Hezbollah attempts. But in July, not a single one of the intelligence repots reached Colonel H., Hirsch or the division's intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel A.

Colonel H. went so far as to accuse the MI officers of rewriting history. In a closed forum, one of his subordinates went even further: He charged that the subcommittee headed by Buchris was set up to "clear" those responsible for collecting intelligence information. Similar claims - that essential intelligence information was missed - were made regarding the October 2000 abduction of three IDF soldiers in Har Dov, and in that case, too, the unit charged with collecting data was cleared of responsibility.

During the in-house investigations, the head of MI's research division, Brigadier Yossi Beiditch, said that some of the regional heads under his command felt that there was sufficient information to establish that there was reason for an alert. From Northern Command's point of view, this is very frustrating, because it suggests that there was intelligence information, but it did not reach the right people. Officers at Northern Command also believe that after the fact, there was an attempted cover-up by the intelligence collection unit in order to diminish the significance of its failures. Officers in that unit reject these claims.

This is a disturbing story, inter alia because it suggests that the IDF is not learning lessons purchased with a great deal of blood. One example is an incident in the late 1990s in which three soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb. There had been intelligence about this bomb, but it was not passed on to units or commanders in the field.

A senior MI source told Haaretz in response to these charges that the Buchris report concluded that the shortcomings in intelligence were not significant and did not contribute to the abduction. Intelligence collection officers said that similar charges are made against them nearly every time there is a problem. "It is very easy to be smart in retrospect and blame the collection unit for not comprehending in time," said one.

We will know what the Winograd Committee thinks about all this on Monday. But in a private conversation last month, a member of the panel said that Gal Hirsch was wronged.