After almost 32 days of a miserable symphony of rhetoric and unexplainable failures on the battlefield, more bitter news from the logistic situation of the army and its inventories start to appear every moment which will be understandable only if one can red in between the lines.

Two days ago, on November 6, a famous Israeli security journalist published a post on his X account, praising a recent decision by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) commanders to “cancel the sales of Merkava tanks to a foreign country”.

He tried to link this decision to what he called “lessons learned” by IOF, and said, “Israel and its army have started to use the lessons they learned from October 7: as part of a decision to significantly increase the ground force capabilities, the contract for selling Merkava-3 tanks to a foreign country was canceled and they are to be used as a new armored unit”.

Without mentioning the name of the country which just got canceled, this post seemed to be talking about a dream every Israeli is having these days: that Israeli authorities in both military and political establishment would already have learned or at least started to learn lessons from the most disastrous day which is now strongly glued to the calendar of all Israelis.

But it didn’t take much long before those who were following the contract cancelation story to find out what was the real reason behind “canceling” foreign sales. An Israeli media published a report on Wednesday, November 8, giving clues about the Merkava-3 tanks.

According to this report, not only there was no contract cancelation, but not even the lesson was learned. The report unveiled that the Merkava-3 tanks about which the Israeli journalist had talked about were “from old models that were scheduled to be disposed of”! And to make things work, the reason for deciding to postpone disposing them is not “to significantly increase the ground force capabilities”, but because of a “shortage”!! According to the report, “Due to a shortage of armor due to field pressure on the Israeli army as a result of multiple battle fronts, the army decided to create a new armored reserve battalion that includes Merkava-3 tanks from the old models that were scheduled to be disposed of”.

Given the number of the Israeli tanks being destroyed by the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza from one hand, and by the Hezbollah in north of the Occupied Palestine on the other, what was reported by the Israeli army seems far too closer to the reality compared to the claims of the journalist quoted above. So far, the numbers of loses of armored vehicles and other military equipment of Israeli army have been published by sources from the other side. No official accounts have been yet provided by Israeli army or military officials; a fact which strengthens the possibility of heavy loses both in equipment and manpower.