Hadassa Ben-Itto, a former judge of the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court, warned in 1987 that “the world is now being prepared to hate the Jews, to delegitimize and dehumanize the Jews. We are being set up as the enemies of the world, so that Jews will deserve what’s coming to them. It will be open season on the Jews in the name of the United Nations."[1]
Nearly four decades later, her warning is worth recalling in considering the extraordinary reception accorded NAZA at the Venice Film Festival.
Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by The Guardian, NAZA received a 25-minute standing ovation-a festival record-and later won the Special Jury Prize. The Guardian introduced it under the headline “Secret systems used by Israel in mass killings of Gaza civilians revealed in new film." Whatever the film’s artistic merits, a 25-minute ovation for a documentary presented as finally exposing Israel’s secret machinery of civilian killing is difficult to understand as applause for cinematography alone. The film was being received as vindication of a political and moral indictment.[2]
That reaction matters because NAZA appeared to provide Israel’s critics with something they had long sought: Israelis from inside the military describing the alleged system themselves. One interviewee describes an expected “NAZA"-acronym for nezek agavi, collateral damage-of 20 civilians for an action; Abraham’s earlier reporting in +972 Magazine alleged that strikes against suspected low-ranking Hamas operatives could be approved even when 15 or 20 civilians were expected to die. Another witness says “there was once an approval for 500," although he says he does not know how many people were actually killed.[3]
The political perspective of the earlier reporting is not hidden. +972 describes its journalism as “intersectional, progressive" and says it seeks to “unpack Zionism as a settler-colonial project." That does not make a particular report false, but when anonymous-source reporting becomes the foundation for an accusation about an entire military institution, independent verification becomes indispensable.[4]
What a NAZA calculation actually reveals
Before deciding what a number such as 20 means, proportionality has to be understood correctly. As I discussed in an earlier article, proportionality under the laws of armed conflict is not a comparison between the number of casualties on the two sides. The legal question is whether the anticipated incidental harm to civilians would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected from the attack.[5]
A NAZA figure therefore establishes that anticipated civilian harm was being estimated. It does not, by itself, establish whether a strike was lawful, unlawful, proportionate or disproportionate, because it reveals only one side of the calculation. The importance of the target, the threat it posed, urgency, available alternatives, the risk to Israeli forces, weapons selection, timing and the consequences of not striking can all be relevant to the military and legal decision.
That point is central to the film’s argument. If the existence of a civilian-casualty estimate is presented as evidence that civilian lives had become meaningless, the very mechanism designed to quantify civilian risk is turned into proof that the risk was ignored. The relevant question is not whether commanders anticipated civilian harm; modern targeting procedures require them to do so. The question is what they did with that information.
What, precisely, did the witnesses see?
NAZA derives its authority from its 24 insiders, but the filmmakers’ own description also locates those witnesses within a much larger apparatus. Abraham and Szor write that most were intelligence officers “working behind screens," and The Guardian describes insiders who helped target Gaza remotely from Tel Aviv. One witness says, “My role is technical"; another calls himself a “small cog."[3]
Those descriptions do not mean the witnesses knew nothing, nor do they make their testimony unimportant. They do mean that surveillance, target development and casualty estimation are not the same thing as controlling the final operational decision to attack. An intelligence officer can know in extraordinary detail what appears on his screen while still not seeing every operational, strategic, humanitarian and legal consideration being weighed elsewhere in the command chain.
The IDF’s published description of its targeting procedures draws precisely that distinction. Intelligence personnel identify and develop potential targets, but the IDF states that these personnel do not approve attacks; the final decision is made by an authorized operational commander after input from different professional disciplines and consideration of operational, policy, humanitarian and legal factors.
Each strike, the IDF explains, is subject to an individual assessment of anticipated military advantage and expected civilian harm.[6]
Twenty-four witnesses can therefore be truthful about what they personally observed and still not establish what the institution as a whole was designed to do or did. That is not a dismissal of their testimony; it is the distinction between testimony about one layer of a system and proof of the system itself.
Evidence supporting the NAZA framework
The strongest evidence supporting the “20" allegation should be confronted directly rather than minimized. In December 2024, The New York Times reported, after reviewing military records and interviewing more than 100 Israeli soldiers and officials-including more than 25 involved in vetting, approving or striking targets-that immediately after October 7 the IDF dramatically loosened its targeting rules. According to the Times, mid-ranking officers could authorize attacks risking up to 20 civilian deaths while pursuing targets that included low-ranking Hamas fighters.[7]
That is clear corroboration, and it prevents the “20" figure from being dismissed as merely a +972 allegation. Yet the Times also reported that restrictions began tightening within weeks, and the IDF disputes the characterization of “20" as a blanket authority to sacrifice that number of civilians. In its January 2025 response, the IDF said civilian-harm thresholds determine which level of command must approve an attack but never eliminate the individual proportionality assessment required for each strike.[8]
The distinction sharpens the real issue. There is substantial evidence that Israel accepted far greater civilian risk during the extraordinary emergency immediately following October 7. What NAZA needed to establish is something larger: that this emergency posture became the normal operating logic of Israel’s targeting campaign rather than a changing set of rules applied at different stages of a major war.
One Reality, Two Lenses: Descriptions of a Single System
John Spencer, a former U.S. Army infantry officer and urban-warfare scholar, says he entered Gaza four times with the IDF, reviewed orders and observed its targeting process. He has described missions being delayed or cancelled because civilians were present, and after NAZA appeared he responded directly to the suggestion that anticipated civilian deaths somehow cease to be “collateral" once they are quantified. His point was that estimating incidental civilian harm is precisely what collateral-damage and proportionality assessments are designed to do; legality depends on the anticipated military advantage, the information available at the time and the precautions taken.[9]
A JINSA task force of retired senior American military commanders reached a similar conclusion after the 2014 Gaza war. It found that Israel “systemically applied established rules of conduct that adhered to or exceeded the Law of Armed Conflict" and described a targeting process that weighed military necessity against civilian risk. JINSA is institutionally pro-Israel and that report concerns an earlier conflict, so it cannot prove how every strike after October 7 was conducted. It does, however, provide a description of the institutional process sharply different from NAZA’s.[10]
We therefore have competing narratives about the same military apparatus. NAZA presents casualty estimates as evidence that extraordinary civilian losses became normalized; the IDF, Spencer and JINSA describe those estimates as part of a wider system intended to constrain civilian harm while pursuing military objectives. When descriptions conflict, the observable record becomes the arbiter.
What the 364 Commander-Linked Incidents Substantiate
In June 2026, an open-source researcher began not with Israeli classifications but with Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s own postwar publications identifying its dead commanders. The researcher connected 391 PIJ commanders to 364 incidents and reconstructed those killed alongside them using Palestinian casualty records, family notices, local reporting and Gaza Ministry of Health identity numbers.[11]
The 364 incidents contained 1,547 identified deaths. In 161 incidents-44.2 percent-no collateral casualty was identified, while 306 of 364-84 percent-had five or fewer. Only 23 incidents had eleven or more identified collateral deaths, and only 12-that is, 3.3 percent-had twenty or more.[11]
The study has limits, and those limits should be stated rather than hidden. It is commander-weighted rather than a sample of the low-ranking operatives described in the Lavender reporting; house strikes are overrepresented, and hundreds of relatives and children appear among the collateral dead. An authorization ceiling is also not the same as an outcome, because a strike authorized to risk twenty civilians may ultimately kill two.[11]
But policies leave footprints. If twenty civilian deaths were routinely accepted for relatively low-level operatives and still greater numbers were routinely accepted for commanders, twenty-plus collateral outcomes should not appear only in a small tail of a commander-heavy dataset. They occurred, and some were catastrophic, but 3.3 percent is not what a routine observed outcome looks like.
That pattern does not refute the Times reporting about the opening weeks of the war. It does, however, make it much harder to take an emergency authorization from one phase of the conflict and use it as a description of the targeting system across the campaign.
The consistent pattern within casualty records
Gabriel Epstein’s analysis of the Gaza Ministry of Health’s May 7, 2026 list provides an entirely different check. Of 72,835 recorded deaths, 33,268-45.7 percent-are males aged 15 to 45, even though that group represented an estimated 24.7 percent of Gaza’s prewar population. Men aged 18 to 45 were 3.35 times more likely to appear on the death list than women of the same age range.[12]
Epstein expressly warns against treating demographic imbalance as proof that any particular man was a combatant, and he notes that civilian men also die disproportionately in war. That caution is important, but it does not erase the pattern. Gaza’s casualty population is plainly not a random demographic cross-section of its prewar population, and any account of a campaign fundamentally indifferent to the distinction between military targets and civilians has to explain the pronounced overrepresentation of military-age males.[12]
The PIJ incident reconstruction and the Ministry of Health demographics use completely different methods, yet they point toward the same evidentiary problem for NAZA’s larger thesis. The observable patterns look more consistent with a targeting system in which military status and civilian harm remained important variables than with one in which exceptionally high civilian casualties were routinely treated as irrelevant.
Evaluating the validity of the film’s specific claims
The film’s underlying examples illustrate why authorization ceilings, casualty estimates and actual deaths cannot simply be treated as interchangeable numbers:
For the October 2023 strike on Hamas Central Gaza Brigade commander Ayman Nofal, two sources told Abraham that the approved collateral figure was 300 while another said 100; Airwars records at least 92 civilians and two militants killed. For the strike on Jabalia Battalion commander Ibrahim Biari, a source said the permissible figure was “around 300"; Airwars currently assesses 126 to 143 civilian deaths and 12 to 24 militants killed.[13]
The December strike targeting Shuja’iya Battalion commander Wissam Farhat presents the opposite problem. A source said more than 100 civilian deaths were anticipated, while Airwars estimates 300 to 501 civilian deaths but grades the available evidence only “Fair," reflecting substantial uncertainty in the reconstruction. These were devastating attacks, but they also demonstrate why the number allegedly authorized before a strike, the number expected to die and the number later reconstructed from open sources are analytically different facts.[13]
Then there is NAZA’s most dramatic allegation: an approval for 500. No publicly identified date, target, unit or authorization document has been produced, the witness says he does not know how many people actually died, and the IDF categorically denies that such an authorization occurred. The IDF also asked the filmmakers to screen the full documentary for military officials so it could respond to the allegations substantively.[14]
The most sensational claim in the film, categorically denied by the IDF, is therefore also the least capable of independent verification. That is a remarkably fragile foundation on which to build a sweeping conclusion about an entire military system.
Why Hamas’s Strategy Defines the Combat Environment
Civilian casualties in Gaza also cannot be interpreted as if Hamas’s method of warfare were irrelevant. Human Rights Watch documented Hamas Interior Ministry spokesman Eyad al-Bozom telling residents of northern Gaza to “stay put in your homes" after Israel issued evacuation orders; HRW could not authenticate a separate Israeli recording alleging that Hamas physically blocked civilians from leaving.[15] Israel encouraged civilians to leave.
Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and a longstanding defender of Israel, wrote in 2025 that Hamas is “well known for using human shields as a crucial element of its military strategy against Israel."[16] Separately, the JINSA task force concluded that Hamas exploited the civilian environment, Israel’s sensitivity to civilian casualties and misunderstandings of the laws of war in an effort to constrain Israeli operations and convert civilian losses into strategic and political pressure.[10]
Those assessments do not relieve Israel of a single legal obligation and Israel has not used them to do so. Civilians remain protected, warnings do not turn civilians into targets, and Hamas’s conduct cannot make an otherwise disproportionate strike lawful. What the battlefield context does mean is that a high civilian toll, standing alone, cannot tell us whether civilians were the object of attack, an accepted incidental risk, the result of failed precautions or the tragic consequence of striking military objectives deliberately embedded within a civilian environment.
What the Evidence Demonstrates
NAZA’s central weakness is not that its witnesses are necessarily wrong. It is that the film asks their testimony be used to provide far more than their vantage point permits. Most were intelligence personnel working remotely-“technical" people and “small cogs" by their own description-seeing casualty estimates at one stage of a much larger process.[3]
Those estimates then moved through a broader targeting process in which operational commanders and other professionals weighed the target, military necessity, timing, weapons, risks to forces, humanitarian concerns and legal considerations before a final decision was made.[6]
That distinction matters because the film treats a partial view of the targeting chain as though it were the whole system. It is not. Spencer observed the operational process itself and describes civilian-harm mitigation affecting actual missions, including delays and cancellations.[9] JINSA’s senior military task force described the same broader architecture: intelligence and collateral-damage estimates were inputs into operational decisions, not the decisions themselves.[10]
On the question NAZA is actually asking-how the system functioned as a system-that wider operational vantage deserves substantially more weight than the view from one intelligence workstation.
The New York Times provides important evidence that Israel accepted greater civilian risk during the extraordinary opening phase after October 7.[7] But the same reporting shows the rules tightening as the war evolved, while the IDF says the numerical thresholds determined the level of approval required rather than automatically authorizing a fixed number of civilian deaths.[8] An emergency rule from one phase of a war cannot simply be turned into the governing principle of an entire campaign.
The strongest test is not another quotation. It is the record of what the system actually produced. In 364 reconstructed PIJ commander-linked incidents, 44.2 percent had no identified collateral death, 84 percent had five or fewer, and only 3.3 percent reached twenty or more.[11] The Gaza Ministry of Health’s own list shows another striking pattern: military-age males are dramatically overrepresented among the dead, with men aged 18-45 appearing at 3.35 times the rate of women of the same ages.[12] Those numbers do not prove every strike lawful. They do something more relevant to NAZA’s thesis: they show that the observable footprint of the campaign does not resemble a system in which exceptionally high civilian casualties had become routine or irrelevant.
This remains the foundational blind spot that the documentary fails to reconcile or adequately address. Its witnesses saw disturbing casualty estimates at one stage of the process. The operational commanders and senior military observers who saw how intelligence was translated into action describe a different system. When the dispute is tested against the casualty pattern, the data fit the operational account far better than NAZA’s sweeping inference from a narrow intelligence vantage point.
This is why the reaction at Venice matters. A 25-minute standing ovation for a film presented as exposing Israel’s hidden machinery of civilian killing was not merely applause for cinematography. The film was received as the long-awaited smoking gun: Israelis themselves had finally confirmed the indictment.[2] But the evidence does not justify that celebration. The testimony establishes that disturbing decisions and unusually permissive thresholds existed. It does not establish that those decisions defined the IDF targeting system as a whole.
Ben-Itto warned of the danger of the verdict arriving before the evidence. NAZA is a striking contemporary example of that danger.
The applause came first; the evidentiary burden came later.
Once the film’s claims are tested against the full decision process and the actual casualty record, the supposed smoking gun looks much less like proof of a criminal system than a partial view of one layer of a complex war.
If NAZA wants to prove that the system itself was the crime, one must provide compelling and irrefutable evidence-a standard this film demonstrably fails to meet.
Footnotes
[1] Alex Grobman, “In dealing ‘with a beast you have to treat him like a beast’ - Harry S. Truman," Israel National News, November 27, 2023.
[2] Emma Graham-Harrison and Xan Brooks, “Secret systems used by Israel in mass killings of Gaza civilians revealed in new film," The Guardian, September 10, 2026; Guardian/Reuters, “Documentary NAZA gets 25-minute standing ovation at Venice film festival premiere," September 10, 2026; Philip Oltermann, “Woman Unknown wins Venice film festival as NAZA takes special jury prize," The Guardian, September 12, 2026; Catherine Shoard and Lorenzo Tondo, “Global release announced for acclaimed Gaza documentary NAZA," The Guardian, September 24, 2026. The September 24 article describes the 25-minute ovation as a festival record.
[3] Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, “‘NAZA’: Exposing Israel’s killing machine in Gaza," +972 Magazine, September 10, 2026 (24 witnesses; most described as intelligence officers “working behind screens"); Xan Brooks, “‘They know the house they are bombing is full of children’: NAZA’s directors on their devastating film about Israeli intelligence," The Guardian, September 11, 2026 (“My role is technical"; “I’m just a small cog"; claim that approval was given for 500 NAZA); Yuval Abraham, “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza," +972 Magazine/Local Call, April 3, 2024 (15-20 civilian-casualty allegation for low-ranking targets).
[4] +972 Magazine, “Editorial: How we’re rethinking our journalism in Israel-Palestine," February 21, 2022. The editorial describes the publication’s approach as “intersectional, progressive" and discusses “unpacking Zionism as a settler-colonial project."
[5] International Committee of the Red Cross, Customary International Humanitarian Law Database, Rule 14, “Proportionality in Attack"; Alex Grobman, “Refuting Hamas claims of civilian fatalities," Israel National News, May 20, 2021. Rule 14 states that expected incidental civilian harm may not be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
[6] Israel Defense Forces, “The IDF’s Use of Data Technologies in Intelligence Processing," June 18, 2024. The IDF states that intelligence analysts identify targets but do not approve attacks; operational commanders approve attacks, and each strike requires an individual assessment of anticipated military advantage and expected civilian harm.
[7] Patrick Kingsley, Natan Odenheimer, Bilal Shbair, Ronen Bergman, John Ismay, Sheera Frenkel and Adam Sella, “Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians," The New York Times, December 26, 2024. The investigation reported that immediately after October 7 the IDF loosened targeting rules, including authority in some circumstances to risk up to 20 civilian deaths, and that restrictions were tightened as the war progressed.
[8] Israel Defense Forces, “IDF Targeting Methods During the First Weeks of the Hamas-Israel War (Response to a New York Times Query Published January 26, 2025)," January 26, 2025. The IDF acknowledges changes to operational regulations after October 7 but rejects the characterization of a blanket 20-civilian authorization and states that each strike remained subject to an individual proportionality assessment.
[9] John Spencer, “I’m a War Scholar. There Is No Genocide in Gaza," JNS, July 2025; John Spencer, “I am a war scholar - there is no genocide in Gaza," The Jerusalem Post, July 27, 2025; Steve Inskeep, “War scholar discusses why he does not think there is a genocide in Gaza," NPR, July 29, 2025; Hanan Lischinsky, “‘Slow and meticulous’: Israeli soldiers refute ‘NAZA’ film’s claims about AI-powered targeting decisions in Gaza," All Israel News, September 16, 2026. Spencer states that he reviewed IDF orders and targeting procedures and says he saw missions delayed or cancelled because children were nearby; his September 2026 response explains that expected civilian harm is precisely what proportionality and collateral-damage assessments are designed to evaluate.
[10] JINSA Gaza Conflict Task Force, 2014 Gaza War Assessment: The New Face of Conflict, Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), March 2015. The report states that Israel “systemically applied established rules of conduct that adhered to or exceeded the Law of Armed Conflict" and argues that Hamas exploited civilian exposure and legal narratives for strategic and political effect.
[11] Middle East Buka, “PIJ Commander Deaths: Incidents and Collateral Casualties," June 24, 2026, X thread and linked research article. The project begins with PIJ’s own postwar commander identifications; 391 commanders were linked to 364 reconstructed incidents containing 1,547 identified deaths. The author reports 161 incidents with no identified collateral casualty, 306 with five or fewer, 23 with eleven or more, and 12 with twenty or more.
[12] Gaza Ministry of Health, List 14, May 7, 2026; Palestine Datasets / Tech for Palestine, “Killed in Gaza" dataset (72,835 identified names); Gabriel Epstein, analysis of Gaza Ministry of Health List 14, X thread, August 3, 2026. Epstein reports that males aged 15-45 account for 33,268 deaths (45.7% of the list) versus an estimated 24.7% of Gaza’s prewar population, and that men aged 18-45 were 3.35 times more likely to appear on the death list than women of the same age range. Epstein explicitly cautions against inferring individual combatant status from demographics.
[13] Yuval Abraham, “‘Bomb the area, gas the tunnels’: Israel’s war on Gaza’s underground," +972 Magazine/Local Call, February 6, 2025; Yuval Abraham, “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza," +972 Magazine/Local Call, April 3, 2024; Airwars, ISPT0280 (Ayman Nofal strike, October 17, 2023; updated August 16, 2026); Airwars, ISPT0783 (Ibrahim Biari strike, October 31, 2023; updated August 11, 2026); Airwars, ISPT1390 (Wissam Farhat strike, December 2, 2023; updated August 11, 2026).
[14] Emanuel Fabian, “IDF denies claim in new ‘NAZA’ documentary that it planned Gaza strike with anticipated 500 civilian deaths," The Times of Israel, September 14, 2026; Fabian, “IDF asks ‘NAZA’ filmmakers to screen documentary for military officials so it can address claims, calls allegations in trailer false," The Times of Israel, September 14, 2026.
[15] Human Rights Watch, “‘Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged’: Israel’s Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza," November 14, 2024, section “Allegations of Hamas Preventing People from Fleeing." HRW records Hamas Interior Ministry spokesman Eyad al-Bozom telling northern Gaza residents to “stay put in your homes" and states that it could not authenticate the separate Israeli audio recording alleging physical obstruction.
[16] Richard Kemp, “International ‘do-gooders’ aren’t helping the people of Gaza," June 4, 2025, reproducing an article first published in The Daily Telegraph on May 19, 2025. Kemp writes that Hamas is “well known for using human shields as a crucial element of its military strategy against Israel."
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. He has an MA and Ph.D. in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.