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Israel’s newly appointed Chief of Staff, Major General Eyal Zamir has stated Israel’s war dead at 5,942 from the siege on Gaza and short-lived incursion into Lebanon.
As is the case in all modern military operations, casualty numbers have been heavily censored or withheld throughout 2024, but multiple Israeli sources, WaL reported, have placed the number of wounded IDF members at over 10,000, a threshold General Zamir confirmed had been breached when he stated that 15,000 injured soldiers and reservists have been absorbed into the rehabilitation system.
These came from a report by Israel’s Channel 12 released on Sunday, in which the General was also supposed to have used the phrase “joining the list of bereaved families” when reporting the number of killed. Al Jazeera said this phrase refers specifically to soldiers and not civilians.
6,000 killed is leagues higher than any previously reported number, and must have played a significant role in Tel Aviv’s decision to carry out its ceasefire in Gaza.
In August WaL cited two different news reports on Israeli casualties claiming between 10,000 and 20,000 soldiers were wounded, of which 8,000 were classified as disabled. Zamir’s totals exceed the highest end of these estimates and are manifold higher than previous official casualty statements that put war dead at 900.
Palestine Chronicle, citing other news outlets, reports that some Israeli sources have claimed that the total number of deaths in the Gaza, Lebanon, and West Bank conflicts has reached 13,000.
Boycotts finally succeed
While over 20,000 Israeli soldiers became casualties of the apartheid state’s genocidal conflicts in Palestine and Lebanon, Israeli firms have also become casualties of the siege on Gaza.
In the 2024 edition of the Anholt Nation Brand Index which uses polls to measure the strength of individual nations’ branding power, Israel came in last place among the world’s nations as having the least powerful and valuable branding—a combination of the image of the actual country and its companies.
40,000 people in 70 countries were polled for their perceptions of six aspects of a nation’s identity: exports, governance, culture, people, tourism, and investment potential, all of which put Israel last—among some of the least-developed and unstable countries on the planet—lower even than Palestine, which Israel doesn’t recognize to be real, and is in the process of trying to destroy.
It ranked poorly on all these metrics, with the youngest of those polled showing a particular aversion to Israel. As a result, Brand IL, a success-driven consortium of Israeli businesses, has launched a $100 million rebranding effort to reverse the negative global reputation of Israeli companies.
“Israel has lost its legitimacy in the international community and has been cast into the backyard of global affairs,” said Motti Scherf, founder of Brand IL. “It is time to acknowledge the failure of traditional public diplomacy and adopt innovative nation-branding models”.
For years, Western guarantors of Israel have made it an outsized task to try and divest or boycott Israeli products and services over concerns about the apartheid state’s treatment of the Palestinians. Many states in the US have passed so-called “Anti-BDS” (boycott, divestment, sanction) legislation that makes it a crime for private individuals to pursue these forms of protest.
Earlier last year, WaL reported that major cracks were appearing in the Anti-BDS effort, which had been an impenetrable wall for decades,
One of the largest firms in all Japan, the Itochu Corporation, ended its partnership with Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems in one of the most significant financial losses for an Israeli company last year. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: In this still from a video released by the Al Qassam Brigade, three IDF soldiers position themselves outside a building before entering and being blown apart by concealed bombs.
