Tl;dr:

That does not mean that Israel wages wars to advertise its weapons, said experts. “Nobody fights wars just to show off their weapons,” said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London.

Yet, at the same time, “in every war against Gaza a range of weapons and surveillance tech has been deployed against the Palestinians which is then marketed and sold to huge amounts of nations around the world,” said Antony Loewenstein, independent journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory.

So can Israeli weapons manufacturers legitimately market their weaponry as “battle proven” when the combat often targets unarmed civilians? They can, said Zoran Kusovac, a geopolitical and security analyst.

“If a weapon’s main purpose is proven in the actual battlefield or in as near realistic circumstances as possible, then they are battle proven,” he said. “You cannot blame countries for buying from Israel. You can test all you want in a lab, but Israel is testing in the field, and as there are never any lags of time between one period of combat to the next, the development cycle is virtually in real time.