TEL AVIV, Israel — Dissent within Israel’s war Cabinet appeared to spill into the open yesterday with the country’s minister for internal security defying an order from Prime Minister Olmert and publicly saying that if Syria was interested, he would endorse negotiating the return of the Golan Heights to the Baathist regime in Damascus in exchange for peace.

The statements from Avi Dichter — a former chief of Israel’s FBI, known as the Shabak — seemed directly to contradict the prime minister, who said on Sunday before the weekly Cabinet meeting that members of the government should not discuss possible Golan negotiations.

Mr. Dichter’s remarks prompted Mr. Olmert to state plainly again that no such talks would be in the offing so long as the Assad regime supports terrorists.

The incoherence from Jerusalem on the negotiations question got even knottier last night after Israel’s Channel 10 news reported that a delegation of private businessmen last week approached a Labor Party leader and current defense minister, Amir Peretz, with an offer from President Assad himself to restart talks on the Golan Heights.

“I think that a process of discussions with Syria is legitimate. If it turns out that there is someone to talk to, I think that the idea is very suitable,” Mr. Dichter said on Israel Army Radio. “Israel can initiate it. Ultimately, initiatives of this kind are of a third party and there is an abundance of third parties in the world. If a third party approaches us, we must reply in the positive.”

Mr. Olmert, however, responded a few hours later during a tour of northern Israel. He warned against “false hopes” and said his country would not start an “adventure when terror is on their side.”

“When Syria stops support for terror, when it stops giving missiles to terror organizations, then we will be happy to negotiate with them,” he said, according to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

The latest twists and turns regarding the Golan suggest two possibilities.The remarks from Mr. Dichter, one of Mr. Olmert’s closest confidants in the government, could be seen as a trial balloon to anticipate a response from Syria.

A year ago, when the country’s army was beating a retreat from Lebanon, Syria’s ambassadors were openly asking the U.S. State Department to broker talks on the Golan with Israel. Also, the prospect of prying Syria away from Hezbollah and Iran in exchange for the high ground of the Golan still appeals to many doves here.

“There is a long history of governments being elected to one thing and then doing something different,” an authority on the Middle East, Martin Kramer, said, referring to Mr. Olmert’s admission last week that any plans for a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank were on hold.

“The Palestinians and Syrians are two tracks. When the train of state is derailed from one, they put it into the other. It is not something that is without precedent. The problem is that the Olmert government was not on a Palestinian or Syrian track. They were on a third rail, unilateral withdrawal,” Mr. Kramer, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who is currently in Tel Aviv, said.

Another possibility, however, is that Mr. Olmert’s government is rapidly imploding after the cease-fire last week with Lebanon. While Israeli Cabinets in the past have seen private spats spill out into the open, the disagreement between Messrs. Dichter and Olmert comes after an avalanche of scandals have engulfed the country’s leaders.

In the last 10 days, the justice minister has resigned amid charges of sexual harassment; members of the Knesset have grilled the military’s chief of staff over a stock trade he made the day of the launch of the air war on July 12, and Mr. Olmert has fended off questions about whether he bent planning laws in exchange for an apartment he rents in Jerusalem from a property developer for an inappropriately low rent.

All the while, the independent commission investigating the government’s conduct in the war has yet to make a finding, and Israel’s newspapers are filled with accounts of how soldiers here were not supplied with adequate rations and had to scavenge in south Lebanon’s towns for food while in the field.

Meanwhile, Israel’s enemies are crowing. Last week, Mr. Assad gave a speech bragging of the success of the resistance. Yesterday, the other main sponsor of Hezbollah, Iran, conducted its second day of war games and its supreme leader again rebuffed the United Nations’ calls for his country to suspend the enrichment of uranium.

Last night Israelis awaited what was promised by Iran to be a “multi-faceted response” to the formal request from the U.N. Security Council last month regarding their nuclear program.

[During a tour of the north of Israel yesterday, Mr. Olmert appeared cool toward an inquiry into the war, saying second-guessing would undermine the army, the Associated Press reported.

“I won’t play this game, the game of beating ourselves up,” he said.

Mr. Olmert’s tour stops included Kiryat Shemona, one of the hardest-hit border towns, and the Arab village of Maghar, which also came under Hezbollah rocket fire during the fighting.

Facing local officials, Mr. Olmert pledged speedy reconstruction and defended his government’s performance. He also appeared to pin some of the blame on his predecessors, saying his government had been in power for just two months when the war broke out.

“We knew for years that there was a great danger, but for some reason, we didn’t translate that understanding into action, like we just did,” he said. “We knew what Iran was doing, what Syria was doing, arming Hezbollah. We acted as if we didn’t know.”

In other developments:

• Nearly all of the 180,000 Lebanese who took refuge in Syria during the war had returned by Sunday, leaving only 2,500 to 5,000 refugees there, a U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman, Jack Redden, said.

• Lebanon needs about $3.5 billion to repair buildings and infrastructure damaged during the war, and the rebuilding effort was being hampered by lack of government leadership, the Lebanese official in charge of reconstruction, Fadel al-Shalaq, told CNN.

• The deputy leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Naim Kassem, said in a television interview that one of his sons was badly wounded during fighting against Israeli troops.

• Israel handed over to U.N. peacekeepers five Lebanese men who were captured during an Israeli commando raid on August 1 in Baalbek.At least 16 Lebanese were killed in the raid on what authorities in the Bekaa Valley city said was in Iranian-built hospital. Israel said the building was a Hezbollah base.]