There is not much point in deleting $(IMAGE) as the entire binaries dir is removed. Furthermore, $(IMAGE) is a prefix rather than a file name.
@@ -362,7 +362,7 @@ ifeq ($(DL_DIR),$(BASE_DIR)/dl)
rm -rf $(DL_DIR)
endif
rm -rf $(BUILD_DIR) $(PROJECT_BUILD_DIR) $(BINARIES_DIR) \
- $(LINUX_KERNEL) $(IMAGE) $(BASE_DIR)/include \
+ $(LINUX_KERNEL) $(BASE_DIR)/include \
.config.cmd
$(MAKE) -C $(CONFIG) clean