What the IDF won’t say about civilian casualties in Gaza
Avner Gvaryahu writes in Haaretz on 6 October 2026:
There’s a sweeping denial in the response to the film “NAZA” released by the Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit – that a strike resulting in 200 civilian casualties was never either “approved or carried out” in the Gaza Strip, and that “no credible claim has been made that a strike on any military objective caused a comparable number of casualties.”
The film’s title is a Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage,” and that’s an unclear term. Consequently, it isn’t very precise. It can refer to the number of civilian casualties the army is authorized to cause to kill a target, but it can also refer to the actual number of civilian casualties. These two meanings aren’t identical, but they are closely connected, and the Israel Defense Forces’ denial relates to both of them.
Nevertheless, it’s worth paying attention to exactly what the IDF didn’t deny. It didn’t write that no attack expected to cause 100 civilian casualties, or 150, was ever approved; it wrote that approval was never granted for 200. And while it added that the maximum actually approved was “much lower,” it didn’t say what it was.
Until now, it has generally been claimed in Israel’s public conversation that civilian casualties of more than 100 were never approved. Now, the ceiling has shifted to 200. Less than 25 years ago, the country was in an uproar over 14 people, most of them children, being killed in the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, then-head of Hamas’ military wing. But since then, we’ve grown accustomed to that “slight bump on the wing,” as a former air force commander once said when asked what he felt when he launched an airstrike on a residential area.
Who decided that it was acceptable to kill 200 women, children and elderly people in order to kill a wanted man? Is killing a Hamas truck driver worth 20 children? And who are we kidding? In the Israel of 2026, is there even any suitable public debate over these decisions?
And what has happened in practice? In the assassination of Ibrahim Biari in Jabalya in late October 2023, at least 126 civilians, including 68 children, were killed, according to the organization Airwars, while another 280 were wounded. In other words, a single attack caused more than 400 civilian casualties. And according to testimony from soldiers that Breaking the Silence collected and cross-checked, the collateral damage approved for that attack was 300.
Around a month later, the assassination of Wissam Farhat, commander of Hamas’ Shujaiyeh Brigade, erased an entire residential complex, killing at least 300 civilians, according to Airwars. At least 118 civilians, including 48 children, were killed in Gaza City’s al-Taj Tower in October 2023. And in his book “6:29,” Haaretz’s Amos Harel described an attack in March 2025 that killed around 400 Palestinians, most of them civilians.
Regardless of whether these levels of civilian casualties were planned or merely happened in practice (the film says they were planned), these incidents caused hundreds of casualties among innocent people.
Another point the IDF raises is that the soldiers the filmmakers interviewed were intelligence personnel familiar with only “a limited and initial stage” of the attack planning process. I don’t know who these soldiers are, but I do know that intelligence personnel have been part of the attack cells themselves since even before former IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi termed this process “the lethality revolution.”
Moreover, The Guardian, whose investigative reporting the film relied on, has already responded to this claim. It said the 24 soldiers interviewed included officers and soldiers who were involved in several stages of the attack process, including intelligence, operations and final approval. It also said their testimony was checked against leaked classified documents, investigations of specific attacks and other sources that didn’t appear in the film.
The IDF also said the interviewees don’t belong to the units responsible for checking the results of every attack. But how does it know? Perhaps they belong to precisely those units. And the New York Times, basing itself on 11 officers, reported that in practice, the army virtually didn’t even try to count how many civilians were killed in each attack.
Regarding artificial intelligence, the IDF said that AI “does not determine” who is defined as a target. And that’s true; it doesn’t determine it. But it does play an extremely major role.
A very senior former defense official described a system in which a target coded “green” is transferred automatically to an attack cell, while only those coded “orange” or “red” are scrutinized by human beings. And when a recommendation is passed on without anyone pausing to review it, the difference between “recommend” and “determine” virtually disappears.
But the problem is even worse than that. In my research into the “chosen blindness” of AI systems, two characteristics came up over and over: They can generate an almost unlimited number of targets, and there’s no way to reconstruct their “judgment.” One can question an officer about why he marked a particular man as a target, but it’s impossible to ask an algorithm.
Moreover, the Washington Post reported that at the start of the war, the criterion for verification was lowered from two sources to one, and that sometimes, an attack was carried out without verifying the system’s recommendation at all.
As for the movie’s claim that lower-level Hamas operatives could be hit if doing so would cause up to 20 civilian casualties, the IDF said this claim confuses “a general policy threshold requiring approval at a senior level” with “permission to strike.” But the New York Times verified an order from October 7, 2023, that allowed lower-level operatives to be assassinated if it would cause no more than 20 civilian casualties. This isn’t confusion; it’s an order.
And as for the context that the IDF demands? Context isn’t justification. The blockade of Gaza doesn’t justify the massacre Hamas committed on October 7, 2023, and the massacre doesn’t justify what Israel did in Gaza.
But if we’re already talking about context, here is some: This is the first war in which AI was used on such a large scale to select targets. The machine shattered the human bottleneck that limited how many targets it’s possible to locate and approve at the very moment when Israel was marinating in pain and anger, with a deeper desire for revenge than ever before. And that is the context that the IDF’s response prefers not to touch.
The film ends with a Gazan father trying to dig under the rubble of his destroyed home and screaming as he searches for his children. He doesn’t appear in any calculation of the collateral damage, not during the planning process and not during the casualty count conducted afterward. But we, as citizens of the country who care what is done in our name, must not allow this.
The film has opened a discussion. Our job is not to let it die.
Avner Gvaryahu is a doctoral student in public policy at Oxford University and a former executive director of Breaking the Silence
This article is reproduced in its entirety