Israel conceals combat losses to project image of 'invincibility': Report

For decades on end, the Israeli regime has been intentionally and systematically withholding the number of the fatalities it has been suffering during resistance operations in order to portray its military as "invincible," a report has revealed.

The Cradle, an online news magazine covering West Asian geopolitics, carried the report on Thursday.

It revealed how the occupying regime has been misrepresenting the extent of the deaths since the 1980s as means of buoying up the morale of both its forces and the regime's settlers.

The first case chronicled by the report goes back to 1982 when a Palestinian resistance fighter struck a building housing Israeli troops in an operation that killed as many as 141 of the forces.

"Decades on, Israel continues to falsely attribute the explosion to a gas leak or structural error that led to the building’s collapse," the report said.

The next instance, which has been confirmed by the Lebanese resistance movement of Hezbollah's Secretary General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, features the movement's naval commandoes' killing of 12 Israeli forces during a 1997 ambush.

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The leader of Hezbollah says any Israeli act of aggression against the resistance front could lead to a major war in the region.

The report then points to a 2014 revenge operation by Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the Gaza Strip-based Palestinian resistance movement of Hamas' armed wing. The operation claimed four Israeli officers in retaliation against an ongoing war by Tel Aviv on the coastal sliver.

The earliest next case features at least 10 similar incidents leading to Israeli fatalities that mostly took place in Syria's Tel Aviv-occupied Golan Heights in 2016.

The study also raises suspicions over a report by the Israeli regime's Channel 7 pointing to the deaths of six troopers in 2017, whose demise the channel attributed to dubious circumstances such as vehicle overturns, sudden deaths during training, misuse of weapons, and suicides.

The Cradle also points to the deaths of two US and Israeli commanders in the Iraqi Kurdistan's capital of Erbil in 2021.

It specified the circumstances leading to the deaths as an operation seeking to avenge the assassinations of Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, former commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), and his companions, who had died in a US drone strike against Baghdad a year earlier.

"However, both the Americans and Israelis claimed the deaths of their respective senior officers were 'non-combat related' – and not in Erbil," the magazine wrote.

And in April this year, four Israeli officers died in another resistance operation seeking retaliation for the Israeli regime's latest war on Gaza. The revenge operation saw Gaza's Islamic Jihad resistance movement firing more than 1,500 rockets toward the occupied territories, including against the cities of Tel Aviv, Ashkelon, and Ramla, causing heavy destruction.

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Islamic Jihad has said all resistance groups would have stepped in to fight against the Israeli regime had it continued its latest aggression against the Gaza Strip.

"The Israeli security establishment is dead set on promoting the notion to its adversaries that its soldiers do not die in warfare," The Cradle noted.

Speaking to the magazine, Hassan Abdo, a specialist in Israeli affairs, attributed this to Tel Aviv's inclination to preserve the image of the "invincible" Israeli trooper. This is "one of the main pillars of the Zionist project based on the tripartite security, immigration, and settlement," he added.

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