"The army should re-examine the conditions for the use of cluster bombs... especially given the need to reduce losses among the civilian population after a complete halt to fighting," the Winograd Commission said.

"The use of these bombs should be restricted to military objectives that justify their use," it said in the 630-page report which was initially released on Wednesday.

However the commission also noted that the use of such arms was not banned internationally and that they were to be found in the arsenals of several Western armies.

The Israeli military says they were used in Lebanon in keeping with international humanitarian law and only against uninhabited zones used by its foes in the Shiite militia Hezbollah, not areas where there were civilians.

The munitions dropped by Israel during its devastating air war against Lebanon included more than a million cluster bomblets, around 40 percent of which failed to detonate on impact, according to the United Nations.

Cluster munitions spread bomblets over a wide area from a single device. The bomblets often do not explode on impact, but can do so later at the slightest touch, making them as deadly as anti-personnel landmines.

At least 38 people have been killed and 217 wounded by cluster bombs in the region since the end of the conflict, according to the United Nations.

During the war which raged from July 12 until August 14, 2006, Hezbollah militants whose capture of two Israeli soldiers sparked the war fired more than 4,000 rockets at northern Israel.

Human rights group Amnesty International earlier on Thursday criticised the Israeli report, saying it had failed to address major issues, including war crimes committed by its soldiers.

The report was "deeply flawed" and failed to probe policies and military strategies that did not discriminate between Hezbollah fighters and Lebanese civilians, it said.

The long-awaited report itself called the 34-day war a "serious missed opportunity" for the Jewish state and said there were "serious failings and flaws" in military and political strategy.

But it said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had acted in what he sincerely believed to have been Israel's best interest.

Amnesty recommended that Israel set up an independent inquiry into its soldiers' actions and a ban on cluster bombs, as well as helping the clean-up operation by providing data about where the munitions were scattered.

Hezbollah said the report confirmed that its guerrillas had defeated the military might of Israel in a conflict that killed 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

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