Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Wednesday that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert does not need to resign in the wake of State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss' scathing report on Olmert and the Israel Defense Forces' handling of the home front during the Second Lebanon War.

"The government's job is to correct the mistakes revealed in the report, and we have begun doing so," said Livni, during a press conference with visiting EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. "The Defense Ministry has taken responsibility for the issue and that is the government's job now."

Livni, who did call on the prime minister to resign following the publication of the Winograd Committee's partial report on the war in late April, added that the government must "stick together as part of the correction of the failures that are presented in the report." Livni said she had yet to read the full report.

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MKs across the political spectrum called on Olmert to step down over the reports findings, and both Likud and National Union-National Religious Party submitted no-confidence motions Wednesday afternoon.

Likud faction whip Gideon Sa'ar said the prime minister's response to the report, in which he issued a harsh personal attack on Lindenstrauss, was "embarrassing and humiliating," adding that "this government of failure is not able to rectify [problems] and learn lessons."

National Union-NRP faction whip Uri Ariel said "a government that abandoned millions of civilians in wartime cannot continue to function, regardless of the prime minister's multiple cover-up attempts.

Meretz faction whip Zahava Gal-On said the reports findings paint the picture of a "reckless prime minister, who gambled not just with IDF soldiers' lives, but also with the lives of the residents of the North."

"Instead of accepting responsibility for the failures and correcting the mistakes, he attacks the comptroller," she continued. "He should draw the obvious conclusions today, and resign."

Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik (Kadima) said that the debate should not be allowed to be personal in nature, but rather should "help the people of Israel."

Knesset State Control Committee Chairman Zevulun Orlev (National Union-NRP) defended Lindenstrauss, saying "the comptroller cannot be de-legitimized as a defensive response to the need to rectify problems. No spin will save anyone from drawing conclusions, even if they must be personal."

Orlev added that the committee will hold hearings with the prime minister, defense minister, IDF chief of staff, and others in order to ensure that report's recommendations are implemented.

PMO blasts comptroller report as 'biased and superficial'
The Prime Minister's Office launched a personal attack on State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss on Tuesday, following the publication of a damning report on the political and military handling of the home front during the Second Lebanon War.

The criticism from the PMO was levelled at Lindenstrauss himself, and distinguished him from the State Comptroller's Office.

"The state comptroller, as is his way, chooses attractive targets and shoots from every direction in order to get big headlines and public attention," said a written response from the PMO.

Senior officers in the Israel Defense Forces General Staff have also in recent days launched attacks on the comptroller in the media, harshly criticizing his choice of language in the report.

The response referred to an "unfathomable and unbridgeable gap" between the 582-page report as a whole, assembled by the office of the comptroller, and the chapter summing up the entire report, written by the comptroller himself.

It called the former and "impressive professional report" while blasting the chapter written by the comptroller himself as "biased and superficial... reflecting the personal and private positions of the State Comptroller regarding several people, the prime minister among them."

The attack on the comptroller also targeted his language use.

"To our surprise, the term 'eclipse of reason,' which is repeated three times in the ten pages of the summary, is not found once in the 600 pages of the report."

The PMO also said that the comptroller blamed decades-old problems with the home front on the Olmert government.

"The comptroller chose to direct his poisonous arrows at the government, which had only been in existence for two months. Was there really an expectation that within two months, the government would solve all of the problems on the home front that had accompanied Israel for a generation?"

The government also responded to a claim in the report according to which it decided to go war without considering the risk to the home front, and did not deal with the matter of the home front during the course of the war.

The response said that the matter was discussed at the outset of the war on July 12, and again in meetings on July 30 and August 6.

In response to the criticism in the report that the government did not hold hearings on evacuating civilians from the north of the country, the PMO response said that its policy on "selective evacuation" was the right one, because, it said, a "mass evacuation would have meant more ghost towns in the north."

IDF top brass: Report unfairly critical of home front chief
Senior IDF General Staff officers have in recent days joined the PMO in criticizing the comptroller's report, saying he was unfairly critical of GOC Home Front Command Yitzhak (Gerry) Gershon.

Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi, while announcing that the IDF is studying the report, nonetheless issued a statement expressing full support for Gershon.

According to the senior officers, both the comptroller and the media often fail to differentiate properly between the home front and the Home Front Command, placing too much emphasis on the Home Front Command's responsibility for addressing the problems that arise in war.

The officers said that the neglect of the home front was "the responsibility of all governments past and present. For years, they failed to resolve legal problems and did not provide the resources necessary for cope with threats. You can't now put the whole story on Gerry."

The General Staff officers added that the report itself points out that in areas where the Home Front Command operated during the war, the civilian population received improved assistance. "Show us one local authority that says we didn't help it during the war," they said.

The officers also rejected the report's claims that Gershon ignored wartime defense minister Amir Peretz's orders, specifically regarding a broader call-up of reserve troops. "The problem is that the minister made the comments during situation assessments, and did not issue them as explicit orders," they said, adding that a more extensive call-up would not have helped the communities under attack.

Gershon's attorney Eldad Yaniv issued a response on his behalf, saying "some of the recommendations in the comptroller's report have already been implemented, as a significant number of them were included in the [Home Front] Command's inquiry conducted after the war."

"Major General Gershon ordered the comptroller's recommendations implemented when the draft report was submitted several months ago," he continued. "The Israeli public needs to know that the home front preparedness in the next war, should it be imposed on Israel, will be different."