Israel’s $48 Billion War Bill Leaves Its Fate With Bond Markets

When a team of Israeli technocrats that calls itself the “government’s CFO” scans the battlefield with the war against Hamas almost seven weeks in, it sees an accounting ledger with billions of debits stacking up.

Their job is to find the money to help pay for it all.

As Israel’s military pushed deeper into Gaza with the goal of uprooting Hamas following its Oct. 7 attack, the Finance Ministry’s accountant general department was fine-tuning forecasts and updating the government’s running tab in real time by logging the costs of every missile interceptor, every flight and every day of deployment by ...