2020 on track to see fewest defense-related deaths in Israeli history

The year 2020 is on track to have the lowest number of security-related deaths in Israel’s history — two — following an overall calm year on the country’s military front, according to new figures from the Israel Defense Forces.

“We are ending a year in which we successfully fulfilled the primary mission of the IDF: providing defense and security. We thwarted every attempt to infiltrate into Israel and we saw a drop in the number of casualties and in the number of rockets fired at Israel,” IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi tells reporters in a year-end briefing.

According to an IDF tally, 174 rockets and mortar shells were fired at Israel by December 2020, the majority of them in February during a two-day round of fighting between the IDF and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

This amounts to a roughly seven-fold decrease from the previous two years, when 1,296 and 1,164 projectiles were fired, respectively.

Kohavi says Israel has also been succeeding in driving Iran out of Syria, with the military seeing a substantial decrease in the number of Iranian-backed fighters in the country, as well as in the amount of weapons transported into and through it to Tehran’s proxies.

“Iranian entrenchment in Syria is in a clear trend of slowing down as a direct result of IDF activities, though we still have a way to go to reach our goals on this front,” the army chief says.

Read the full report here.

— Judah Ari Gross