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.

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.

MG