The enormous costs of Israel’s multi-front war and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to turn his country into a “super-Sparta” of the Middle East are driving up the defence budget and raising fears of cutbacks in education and healthcare.

The total cost of the series of interconnected regional conflicts that began with Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 stood at 405 billion shekels ($138 billion) as of late April, according to the governor of the Bank of Israel, Amir Yaron.

“That’s a huge figure, more than 17% of GDP,” he said during a recent economic conference in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv.

Just the military campaign against Iran, which began with a wave of US-Israeli strikes on February 28, incurred an additional cost of 35 billion shekels ($12 billion) for the state up until a ceasefire took effect on April 8, according to an initial estimate by the Finance Ministry.

– AFP