commander of the Northern Command, Gen. Udi Adam, was practically fired already on 8 Aug, after the repeated failures to capture Bint Jbeil and Ayta ash-Sha'b. Chief of Staff Halutz sent his deputy, Maj.-Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, to Northern Command, to serve as his "coordinator" beside Adam. Adam formally resigned from the army in September. Chief of Staff Dan Halutz himself resigned in January 2007. Veteran Israeli war correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai claimed that the problem was not limited to the commanding officers. He claimed that a "crybaby culture" had developed among the soldiers of the Israeli army. Almost every Israeli offensive operation in the war, including those in Ayta ash-Sha'b, were called off as soon as resistance was encountered and casualties were sustained, even though IDF in almost every clash enjoyed superiority, both in terms of numbers and firepower. Soldiers often abandoned their missions and focused all efforts on evacuating casualties from the battlefield rather than continuing to pursue their objectives. Gilad Sharon asked in a column in Yedioth Ahronoth after the war: "How could it be that after a month of war, our soldiers were still being wounded among the still-standing houses of the village of Aita al-Shaab, hundreds of meters from the location of the abduction that sparked the war?" Casualties The Municipality of Ayta ash-Sha’b published a casualty list that included the names of 11 Hizbullah fighters who were killed in the battle of Ayta ash-Sha’b. Eight of these were locals and three were from other localities in Lebanon. Another eleven named fighters were wounded. The town also suffered eight "civilian martyrs". These Hizbullah casualties were largely confirmed by other sources: Journalist Simon Assaf (eight locals), The Washington Post (eight locals), Nir Rosen and Hannah Alam of McClatchy (nine locals) and Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth ("around ten" residents, "in addition to other fighters who arrived"). Ayta resident Commander Muhammad Wahbi Surour was also named a "martyr of Ayta", but he was killed in an air strike near the village of Barish further to the north. He was an logistics officer and one of the three highest ranked Hizbullah commanders to die in the war. The IDF, on the other hand, claimed that 40 Hizbullah guerrillas were killed in the battle. Two Hizbullah fighters were taken prisoner by the IDF during the battle of Ayta ash-Sha'b. The captured fighters were not recognized as prisoners-of-war. In September 2006 the two