En som sett IDF:s agerande inifrån berättar:
The airstrikes we canceled: What NAZA leaves out
The film has it backwards: I worked with the IDF's casualty estimate system. It's a brake on civilian deaths, not a license to kill
Three years ago today, I put on my uniform.
Since then, I have served hundreds of days of reserve duty, including in the Israeli Air Force’s planning and operations directorate. Part of my job involved supporting IDF ground troops and requesting strikes. On every front of this war.
Now a film named after one of the procedures we used to minimize civilian harm and exercise self-restraint, often at the expense of military goals and while endangering our own troops, is playing in theaters around the world. It is called NAZA, the Hebrew acronym for “nezek agavi.” Collateral damage.
The film gets that procedure backwards.
I want to tell you what NAZA is. From the inside.
A brake, not a license
Here is how it works.
A unit on the ground asks for a strike. Before anything flies, someone has to answer a question: how many civilians are near this target and is the military need worth the risk to them?
That answer is the NAZA.
It is not a quota. It is not a kill count. It is a brake. It’s a constraint.
When the number is high, the munition gets smaller. The angle changes. The timing moves. A warning goes out. Or – in many cases – the strike is called off entirely.
The funnel
A strike is not one decision by one person. It is a funnel.
First comes the request. Then initial planning. Then collateral-damage clearance. Munitions planning. Approval by a senior commander, with military legal advisers and international law experts in the process. Then the aircrew, who make the final call.
At every stage, a strike can get nixed. Many do.
The word came first
Throughout the past three years, I took part in a civilian initiative that tracked how the war was playing out on social media. We kept a heat map of the words that came up again and again in tweets, posts and videos.
Within days of October 7, while we were still clearing Hamas gunmen out of our kibbutzim and fields and before our ground forces had entered Gaza, the word “genocide” was already being sprayed across social media. It started small. Then the term grew bigger every week as it was mentioned more and amplified over and over. The verdict arrived before the evidence.
I saw how the claim that Israel is committing genocide came instantly and reflexively and finally ballooned into an automatic truth. A word repeated often enough begins to sound like a finding. Commissions and advocacy groups – hostile to Israel to begin with – eagerly adopted it, providing it with a tinge of legitimacy.
Journalist från Times of Israel fick se filmen NAZA:
NAZA’s claims about IDF conduct in Gaza are grave. So are the film’s journalistic flaws
The documentary draws on 24 alleged whistleblowers, but the explosive allegations, assembled to serve a narrative that Israel paid no heed to civilian deaths, suffer from questionable sourcing and deficient investigative rigor
- The 80-minute film, produced by the British newspaper The Guardian, does not, however, include key elements typically associated with investigative journalism, including independent verification of testimony or contextual information. The filmmakers did not give the subject of the allegations — in this case, the Israel Defense Forces — an opportunity to respond before publication, a standard practice.
- The film tries to present its allegations as factual claims, but omits verification and context, and raises questions about its sourcing.
- The film features interviews with 24 people identified by the filmmakers as “Israeli soldiers involved in the remote mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” who spoke on condition that their identities be protected.
The number of interviewees could give the allegations additional weight were they all corroborative. But the testimonies, contrary to the filmmakers’ claims, cover a variety of different subjects.
- The film generally does not provide information about speakers that identifies their proximity to the subjects they discuss, which would establish them as authorities while protecting their anonymity. For most, no age, pseudonym, or military role is provided, and because the interviewees are anonymized and their voices digitally altered to protect their identities, it makes it difficult at times to distinguish between speakers as the film cuts between interviews.
- The film’s subtitles also contain apparent translation issues, including adding words not present in the spoken testimony. For example, a soldier’s comment that “Ahmad and his entire family” are in a home, is subtitled as “Ahmad and his entire family will die.” A speaker’s claim that “There was an approval of, like, 500 for a single person,” becomes the more definitive “There was approval once to kill 500 for one human target” in the subtitles.
IDF svarar:
IDF gives rejection of 'NAZA' film claims, disputes civilian death ratios, AI targeting abuse
The IDF on Thursday gave its first comprehensive and detailed response and rejection of the NAZA film's claims that Israel committed genocide during the Gaza war.
According to the IDF, its delayed response stemmed from the NAZA filmmakers neither providing advance notice of the claims nor allowing it to see the movie until recent days.
