Barak leads in Israel's Labor Party polls

Occupied Jerusalem: Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday won the first round of the Israeli Labor Party's leadership election and will face an ex-security chief in a runoff vote next month, official results showed.

Although Barak and former secret service chief Ami Ayalon have called on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to quit over his handling of last year's Lebanon war, both have stopped short of saying they would pull Labor out of his governing coalition.

Official results with all but one polling station counted showed Barak with 36 per cent of the vote to Ayalon's 31 per cent, figures short of the 40 per cent needed to avoid a June 12 runoff.

The outcome of the first round of voting among some 104,000 Labor members effectively toppled Defence Minister Amir Peretz as the centre-left party's chairman.

His unpopularity, along with Olmert's, plunged in the wake of the costly conflict last July and August with Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas. An official inquiry found that both had mishandled the war, stirring public pressure for them to resign.

Barak, a former general and Israel's most decorated soldier, served as prime minister from 1999 to 2001.

But several polls have suggested that Ayalon, who also has a military pedigree as a former admiral, will emerge on top in the runoff.

Both men have said they want to secure Israel's future by making peace with its Arab neighbors and have agreed to keep Labor as the ranking junior partner in Olmert's government for now.