Mofaz: Israel's hawkish former general

Although the transport minister trails Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in recent polls, he has burnished his thick security resume to argue he is better equipped to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the head of Kadima.

Mofaz, 59, a former army chief and defense minister sparked a political firestorm in Israel in June when he told a newspaper that if Iran continued its nuclear program, Israel would attack it.

Israel has long considered Iran its main strategic threat because of its nuclear program, which the Jewish state and the West believe is aimed at developing nuclear weapons. Tehran insists the program is peaceful, and Israel itself is widely believed to be the regions only nuclear armed state.

Mofazs remarks were panned by the defense ministry and the local media, but in retrospect may have been the first volley in a campaign that pits him against Livni, a former Mossad spy with a similar reputation for toughness.

He insists, however, that he is committed to making peace with the Palestinians, although he recently referred to the efforts over the past two years, including U.S.-backed talks relaunched in November, as a "waste of time."

"On many subjects I am closer to the views of those who think they are on the left," he told Israel’s mass-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper last week. "I want peace no less than they," he said.

"The difference between me and them is that I served the state of Israel on security matters."

Mofaz himself hails from Tehran, where he was born on Nov. 4, 1948 and lived there until emigrating to Israel in 1957.

After joining the army ahead of the 1967 Six Day War Mofaz climbed the ranks until he was appointed chief of staff in 1998 by then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the current head of the right-wing Likud party.

Two years later Mofaz was tasked by the then Labor premier Ehud Barak with pulling Israeli forces out of south Lebanon after two decades of occupation.

But he soon underlined his hardline credentials in the early months of the 2000 intifada with his outspoken attacks on the Palestinian Authority, which he branded a "terrorist entity" in March 2001.

It was Mofaz who led the invasion of the West Bank that spring and laid siege to the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in his West Bank compound.

Mofaz, like Olmert and Livni, had long seemed at home in Netanyahus right-wing Likud party, but like them he was persuaded to move to the centrist Kadima by the party’s founder Ariel Sharon in late 2005.

The decision allowed Mofaz to save his job as defense minister.

While a relative political novice, having entered government only in October 2002, Mofaz won Sharon’s respect for guiding the withdrawal of troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the country’s first-ever pull-out from occupied Palestinian territory.

Mofaz is married and has four children.