JERUSALEM — When Lieutenant General Dan Halutz was asked in 2002 why he had just ordered a 1-ton bomb to be dropped on a Palestinian Arab building in Gaza, killing 14 people, including nine children, he had a simple and deadly serious reply.

“For a half-ton bomb to achieve the effect we wanted,” he said, “we would have had to drop two of them.”

At the time, General Halutz was the head of Israel’s air force, and his targets were Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

Now the man known as Israel’s most uncompromising officer is the chief of staff, leading the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

There, too, his tactics have led to criticism over “disproportionate” use of force.

At a briefing on Monday, a senior officer told reporters that General Halutz had ordered retaliatory strikes on a civilian district of Beirut known as a Hezbollah stronghold.

“For every Katyusha barrage” on the northern Israeli city of Haifa, “10 more buildings in the Dahiya neighborhood of south Beirut will be bombed,” the senior officer quoted him as saying.

The Israeli army quickly issued a statement saying the officer had misunderstood General Halutz but, whether the report of his remarks was strictly accurate or not, he has established a reputation for heartless talk.

“These latest statements made by the chief of staff do not represent an isolated incident,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel noted. It said “a black flag of egregious illegality hovers over” his orders that could even “constitute war crimes.”

For his allies, however, General Halutz is the best choice to lead an army that they say defends the very existence of Israel.

“Dan Halutz is not only suitable, he is the right general at the right time to be the commander of our army,” an air force colleague and Israeli politician, Eliezer Cohen, said when General Halutz got the job last year.

Before his nomination, he had won admirers for his record of streamlining and modernizing the army in the face of internal resistance.

“The army should be much smaller, much faster, and with bigger firepower, and the person to make it happen is Dan Halutz,” Mr. Cohen said.

The target on the night of July 22 was a Hamas militant, Sheik Salah Shehada. Shehada was killed, but so were more than a dozen other people. Despite the apparently indiscriminate nature of the attack, General Halutz praised the pilots who led the raid.

But afterward, 27 air force pilots refused to continue serving. “We oppose carrying out attack orders that are illegal and immoral,” they said in a statement. “We refuse to take part in IAF attacks in civilian population centers; [and] refuse to continue to injure innocent civilians.”