(Adds details) By Dan Williams JERUSALEM, April 27 (Reuters) - An imminent Israeli commission of inquiry report on last year's Lebanon war will censure Prime Minister Ehud Olmert but stop short of recommending he resign, Israeli television reported on Friday. The Winograd Commission's interim findings, due out on Monday, are widely expected to shape the fate of Olmert and Defence Minister Amir Peretz, whose popularity plummeted after the inconclusive July-August assault on Lebanese Hezbollah. Channel Ten television quoted a leaked copy of the 160-page report as criticising Olmert for "misguided and rash judgment" in launching the air, sea and land campaign after Hezbollah guerrillas abducted two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. The panel further accused Olmert, who unlike many of his predecessors lacks a military pedigree, of too easily approving operations proposed by his top brass and of lacking foresight on how the war could play out, Channel Ten said. It said that Peretz, a former trade union boss who took the defence portfolio as part of a coalition deal with Olmert, was faulted by the Winograd Commission for his inadequate knowledge in matters of national security. But Channel Ten's political correspondent, Chico Menashe, added: "It has to be pointed out that there is no bottom line telling Prime Minister Olmert or Peretz what to do. They are not telling them to go home." Many Olmert critics suspect that the Winograd Committee will pull its punches, noting that it was appointed by the government despite public calls for a more independent panel. PARTIAL FINDINGS The interim report will limit its critique to the first 5 days of the war. An Israeli general has described this stage as orderly, in terms of the military planning, but that increasing disarray followed as Israel failed to achieve its original aims. "In fact, it unfolded otherwise, into a long and controversial war, as is now known, whose outcomes are also in dispute," Major-General Gadi Eizenkot, who was chief of operations at the time, said in a speech on Wednesday. Olmert has argued that the conflict improved Israel's security by banishing Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah from its frontier strongholds and boosting a U.N. peacekeeper force. But Hezbollah managed to fire 4,000 missiles into northern Israel, driving a million residents to shelters and shaking the Jewish state's belief in its military superiority in the region. Olmert has vowed to survive the war's fallout and serve out his term in office. He has tried to revitalise his statesmanship with a show of support for a Saudi proposal for Israeli-Arab peace, though many Arab leaders want more concrete gestures. "In order to get through the first two weeks (after the report's publication) safely, Olmert took a slight turn to the left," veteran pundit Nahum Barnea wrote in Israel's biggest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. The war killed 158 Israelis, including 117 soldiers and 41 civilians. About 1,200 people died in Lebanon, including an estimated 270 Hezbollah gunmen. Israel was criticised abroad for the devastation caused to Lebanon's civilian infrastructure.
