Israel’s War on Gaza Cost it $42 Billion

The cost of the war for the Israeli occupation, until mid-January 2025, was 150 billion shekels (about $ 42 billion). That is an average of 300 million shekels (about $84 million) per day, according to the Israeli Yedioth Ahronoth.

The newspaper reported there are large gaps between the cost of fighting in Lebanon, the cost of the Gaza Strip, and the “days of intense fighting” (i.e. attempts to confront Iranian missiles).

According to it, the heaviest cost in security expenditures is “funding the reserve army,” which amounts to 45 billion shekels (more than $12 billion).

A high-ranking source in the Israeli Ministry of Finance previously stated the huge new budgets allocated for 2025 to rebuild the northern and southern settlements are “frozen.”

The source told Yedioth Ahronoth that “the use of these budgets will not be possible until the final approval of the government budget.”

The source added the failure to approve the government budget for 2025 “is already causing significant damage to the economy, while the concern in the Finance Ministry now is that Israel will be run for an entire quarter on an interim budget, with the budget for each of the months of January, February, and March equal to 1/12 of the original government budget for 2024.”

However, “the Finance Ministry’s accountant general decided to allocate a smaller budget, for fear that there would be a need to finance additional months with an interim budget, and to create a reserve aimed at preventing disruption to the budgets of vital services for Israelis.”

In the same context, a senior government economic source also expressed to Yedioth Ahronoth “real concern about the possibility that the government budget will not be approved by the deadline set by law, March 31.”

“If that happens, it will be a disaster,” the source said, adding that “the government’s failure to run the full budget required during the war, with a huge deficit and special security tasks that cannot be implemented, will cause enormous damage to the economy and security,” as stated in Al Mayadeen.