Over 10,000 soldiers have been treated by the army’s rehabilitation division since the start of the genocidal war in Gaza
The Israeli defense ministry announced on 14 August that the army’s rehabilitation division has treated over 10,000 soldiers since 7 October.
According to the figures, 37 percent of those treated suffered “physical trauma to their limbs,” while 35 percent are “suffering from PTSD or other mental disorders caused by trauma.” Sixty-eight percent of those treated are reservists.
Furthermore, the rehabilitation division forecasts that by 2030, there will be about 100,000 disabled veterans, with half being related to mental health.
“The Defense Ministry is now discussing a strategy to absorb and treat those wounded in the war, on top of approximately 62,000 disabled IDF veterans already being treated by the division before the war,” Haaretz reported on Wednesday.
The stark figures come as Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza approaches the one-year mark. Despite flattening the strip and slaughtering tens of thousands, recent analyses show that the army has only managed to defeat three battalions of the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas.
“As of July 1, only three of these 24 battalions were combat ineffective, meaning they were destroyed by the Israeli military,” CNN reported on 5 August, citing data compiled by the Critical Threats Project (CTP) and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
“Eight battalions are combat effective, able to carry out missions against Israeli soldiers on the ground in Gaza. The remaining 13 have been degraded, only able to conduct sporadic and largely unsuccessful guerrilla-style attacks,” it added.
In March, the Israeli army claimed 20 of the 24 Qassam battalions had been “dismantled.”
Aside from the Qassam Brigades, the Quds Brigades of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the Mujahideen Brigades, and several other factions remain entrenched across the strip and are involved in confrontations against the Israeli army.
Nearly two percent of the Gaza Strip’s entire population has been killed by Israel during its genocidal war on the strip, according to figures released on 11 August by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS).