Over the past few days, I have reviewed all the testimony in NAZA, a documentary about Israeli military strikes in Gaza. I obtained the complete testimony despite an effort to withhold a full copy at this stage from people in Israel with firsthand knowledge of the strike approval process. I went through it several times, comparing its serious allegations with the processes I took part in and knew firsthand.
I came away convinced that NAZA was not made to establish the truth or understand how the strike process worked. In my view, the filmmakers started with a conclusion: Israel had built a sophisticated, automated system for killing Palestinians indiscriminately. They then worked backward, turning the facts into false allegations to fit that story.
This is how the film builds its case:
I do not claim to have seen every strike in Gaza, or that every interviewee in the film is lying. Some of the incidents described may warrant investigation. But the film goes beyond claiming that mistakes were made. Its central claim is that this is how the system operated. My response is unequivocal: I regard that account as a deliberate misrepresentation. It is not how the system worked.
Throughout my military service, including this war, I gained firsthand knowledge of how strikes were reviewed and approved. I took part in discussions about the presence of civilians and hostages. I knew the checks and legal consultations that preceded a strike. I watched many dozens of strikes being changed, postponed, or called off. Some of those cases and dilemmas appear in my book Matir Asurim, about my service at the hostage headquarters in the weeks after the October 7, 2023, attacks.
One of the film's central distortions is its deliberate, often illogical conflation of distinct steps: locating a person through intelligence, establishing that a person or site is a military target, estimating possible civilian harm, planning the strike, approving it, and carrying it out. These are different stages, handled by different people. Unit 8200 intelligence officers do not authorize strikes. They see part of the picture. The film presents that partial view as the whole.
Establishing that someone is a military target is one step in the process, not permission to strike. The weapon, timing, method of attack, and risks to civilians still have to be assessed, as did the risks to hostages during this war. In the processes I knew, commanders, specialists assessing the civilian population, air force personnel, legal advisers, and others were involved. Any of them could change the plan or stop it.
Another recurring distortion concerns numbers: a collateral damage ceiling of, say, 20 civilians, or a building occupancy estimate of 25 percent after evacuation. The film treats these figures as if they showed what had actually been approved. The substantial review that followed those initial figures changes the picture entirely.
Protecting a source's identity does not remove the need to corroborate what they say. Here, the lack of corroboration is more than a gap in the reporting. It is what allows fragments of information from one part of the process to become an indictment of the entire system.
One final point before turning to the claims: I have left out substantial amounts of classified information because of its sensitivity. In my assessment, that information could further rebut the filmmakers' arguments and expose additional manipulations. I hope the relevant authorities find ways to make it public soon.
I served in Israeli Military Intelligence and took part in discussions about strikes, civilian harm and the risk to hostages. I wrote Matir Asurim, a documentary novel drawn from the work of the Hostages and Missing Persons Unit after October 7.
Interviewer: "What is the highest number you remember for a single strike?"
Speaker: "I can't say how many were killed, because they never check that, but there was an approval for 500. For one person."
Interviewer: "Five hundred? That's like a small town in Israel."
Speaker: "Yes."
The film introduces the number 500 as fact early on, then uses it to define how Israel conducted the war.
What the film leaves outThe testimony provides no date, location, target, or strike record. There is no way to match it to a specific incident. The IDF has denied planning, approving, or carrying out a strike in Gaza with that projected civilian death toll. Publicly available figures, including those based on Gaza Health Ministry data, do not point to a single strike approaching 500 deaths either.
A projected toll that high would have required approval at the highest levels of military command. I never encountered such a case, and neither did the people I spoke with.
Without an identifiable incident, a date, or an outcome, the number does not establish how the system operated. Instead, it plants an image of indiscriminate slaughter in the viewer's mind before any evidence that can be checked has been presented.
Speaker: "I was in meetings with very senior officials who talked about moving the entire population north of Netzarim to the south of Netzarim, with no intention of bringing them back, or creating maximum pressure so everyone would get out. They didn't care how or why... Say I have this neighborhood here. I divide it into lots and lots of little squares. They say: a lot of people evacuated here, so I'll use 25 percent of the usual occupancy. A few people evacuated here, so that's 50 percent. Hardly anyone evacuated here, so that's 75 percent."
Interviewer: "Who remained in... Yes. Yes."
Speaker: "The entire Gaza Strip is mapped out like that. Basically, the map had green, yellow, red, and 100 percent was white. In al-Mawasi, for example, you had purple for occupancy of as much as 300 percent."
Interviewer: "Yes. So they're all moving south."
Speaker: "Yes. That's the direction... Salah al-Din Road, here. The general assumption was: we're bombing buildings in areas where 75 percent of civilians have evacuated. According to the algorithms, 25 percent are still there. A building was expected to take at most 10-15 minutes to come down... We don't know who they are. We don't check afterward what happened. Yes."
The film claims that the IDF mapped Gaza to drive civilians out of combat zones, systematically destroy their homes, and leave them with nowhere to return.
What the film leaves outThis is one of the film's most blatant distortions, and one of the easiest to refute. Its portrayal of the IDF burning homes for pleasure and killing residents inside them ignores one of the military's largest and most complex efforts of the war, an effort that demanded enormous resources and cost lives.
From the first days of the war, and especially after the ground offensive began in late October 2023, the IDF worked to move civilians out of combat zones to prevent them from being harmed. Thousands of soldiers and officers took part. Millions of messages were sent to residents. Countless strikes and operations were called off because the areas had not been evacuated.
Consider al-Mawasi, which the film describes as reaching 300 percent of its usual occupancy, or three times its normal population, without explaining why. This narrow coastal strip in southern Gaza had been designated by the IDF as a refuge for evacuees. Tent areas, field hospitals, supplies of water, food and medicine, and designated evacuation routes were established there. That context is essential to any serious examination of the evacuation effort.
Moving civilians out of combat zones was a humanitarian undertaking on an enormous scale, intended to minimize civilian harm and supported by substantial resources. In my view, recasting it as an effort to harm innocent civilians is a malicious fabrication.
Speaker 1: "I can't say how many were killed, because they never check that, but there was an approval for 500."
Elsewhere in the film:
Speaker 2: "A building was expected to take at most 10-15 minutes to come down... We don't know who they are. We don't check afterward what happened. Yes."
Later in the film:
Speaker 3: "The officer designated all the company commanders. I mean, designated the homes of all the company commanders in the battalion... There's this person; he's NAZA 13. And I hear his child watching television, and... What do I do? What do I do with that? This is..."
Interviewer: "And that child is just NAZA 1 out of the 13."
Speaker 3: "Yes, they say, with the whole family there. They struck their homes at night, simultaneously."
Interviewer: "And then there's BDA. You find out: were they there? Were they not?"
Phrases such as "they never check" and "we don't check afterward what happened" suggest a military that simply did not care who died.
What the film leaves outThe IDF's standard procedure includes a comprehensive review of each strike. In fact, later in the film, the interviewees themselves describe BDA and the subsequent identification of casualties.
In my experience, these assessments were a routine and central part of the air force's work. I am not claiming that every strike was always investigated perfectly. But the film's own testimony contradicts the claim that the military never checked.
The film's portrait of a wholly indifferent military depends on the word "never." Yet its own testimony shows that assessments were carried out.
Interviewer: "How many people live in those buildings?"
Speaker: "If I remember correctly, each was about four stories. It looked that way, more or less. Four stories, divided in two down the middle, with a stairwell, an elevator, and an entrance inside. So that comes to about eight apartments per building. Eight apartments, times five people, times however many buildings. It looks like eight; there were actually more. You're already at... 320. You see? Yes, 320. Even if you say, give me just 25 percent of that. Yes."
Interviewer: "You're assuming only 25 percent of the people are left there, and that's why it's green."
Speaker: "Yes. Yes. So you say, that comes to 80 dead. That's not a small number. And 80 is just for one neighborhood. There are another five to ten."
Interviewer: "And how much of that did they bomb?"
Speaker: "All of it."
The interviewee uses the colors on evacuation maps to suggest that buildings were demolished with a quarter of their residents still inside.
What the film leaves outThis is a serious manipulation of the numbers. As I understand it, the resulting conclusion simply does not match what happened. The "25 percent occupancy" cited in the film was actually a range: zero to 25 percent. Completely empty buildings were therefore also marked green. Published reports, including reports from sources in Gaza, indicated that most residents had evacuated, following the IDF's efforts on the ground. The film certainly does not establish that 25 percent of the families, or even 1 percent, remained in the buildings it describes.
The evacuation maps were part of the effort to enable the IDF to operate in Gaza's built-up areas, where hundreds of weapons depots and thousands of terrorists were located. Although terrorists did everything they could to obstruct evacuation, the IDF made determined efforts to move civilians to humanitarian zones. It checked the areas where it operated, issued loudspeaker announcements and evacuation messages, and systematically reviewed the strikes it carried out.
I never encountered the indiscriminate destruction of residential towers with their residents still inside. More broadly, the claim that a 25 percent occupancy figure served as a threshold for attacking an occupied building does not match what I witnessed.
Interviewee: "[The system] makes target recommendations."
...
Interviewee: "Lavender flags whether a phone number belongs to a Hamas member or not, with 85 percent accuracy."
Interviewer: "At least 15 percent are not Hamas operatives."
Interviewee: "Yes."
Later:
Interviewee: "The person who killed was the one who deployed the bombs. The person who established the target's status was an analyst who made that decision. And the person who carried out the policy on the use of firepower was the officer responsible for it."
The film surrounds the word "recommendations" with images of technology running out of control. The impression is that a machine decided whom to kill.
What the film leaves outIn its response, the IDF described Lavender as a database used to support intelligence work. A name appearing in it could not, on its own, establish that a person was a military target. Other information and checks were required. An 85 percent accuracy rate for a supporting tool does not mean that 15 percent of the people attacked were innocent.
The interviewees themselves describe people making decisions at every stage: an analyst who established the target's status, an officer who set the rules for the use of firepower, and personnel responsible for the weapons.
In the processes I knew, technology helped people find and check information. It did not decide who would die or replace the approval process. Even after a target was validated, the strike still had to be planned, the presence of civilians and hostages assessed, the weapon chosen, and the necessary approvals obtained.
This is a contradiction at the heart of the film's argument, not a minor ambiguity. It exploits the fear of an all-powerful, futuristic machine killing indiscriminately. By deleting the steps between a software recommendation and an actual strike, the film turns a database and a structured process of corroboration into a killing machine.
Interviewee: "Anyone listed in Lavender could be bombed with NAZA 20."
Interviewer: "But when you authorize killing 20 people for every junior operative, and there are dozens of junior operatives,"
Interviewee: "Then you get to all of Gaza. Right, true. I just didn't really know what to do with that realization. Right, yes. That's why, at some point, I really couldn't stay there. I couldn't stay there, and I can't be part of this."
Later in the film:
Interviewee: "Even if you call it collateral damage, it's intentional killing. He was there; you intended to kill him."
Interviewer: "Do you now think this is genocide?"
Interviewee: "Yes. Absolutely."
The interviewer frames NAZA 20 as "authorization to kill 20 people" - a framing that sets up the next leap: the interviewee, working from that framing, concludes on his own that "you get to all of Gaza." Later, awareness of a risk to civilians becomes "intentional killing," leading to the conclusion: genocide.
What the film leaves outNAZA is an estimate of risk. A collateral damage ceiling sets an upper limit for the review; it is neither a goal nor an actual death toll. In the discussions I took part in, we examined who was nearby, whether civilians had evacuated, whether hostages might be present, and which weapon and timing were being considered. Strikes were often changed or called off even when the estimate was below the stated limit. Those decisions often came at a significant operational cost.
The legal distinction matters, too: a collateral damage estimate does not, by itself, establish the specific intent required to prove genocide.
The film does not establish a fact here. It builds the conclusion into the question, gets a "yes" from the interviewee, and presents three logical leaps as evidence. In doing so, it skips over the many steps actually taken in the operational process.
The system is referred to in English reporting as "Where's Daddy?"
Speaker: "So we find them in their homes, or their families' homes, or their mistress's, or wherever. 'Where's Daddy?' is really a mechanism for knowing when an operative has arrived home. We manage to connect to the family which is the target."
Interviewer: "And you know when he got home?"
Speaker: "You hack a 12-year-old girl's phone. Say the girl calls her mother. 'Yamma,' she'll call her 'Raja'. That would be the message that triggers the mechanism. You have the root ʿRajaʿ here. Ah, 'baba,' Dad."
An account of intelligence gathering and locating someone at home is presented dramatically as a mechanism that immediately triggers a strike on the house and the family, without explaining that locating the person is only one stage in the process.
What the film leaves outThe account describes how intelligence indicated that a person had arrived home. It tells us nothing about whether he had been established as a military target, who else was in the house, whether civilians or hostages were present, what weapon was considered, or who authorized a strike. It does not tell us whether a strike took place or what happened afterward.
The film stops exactly where the operational review begins. In the processes I knew, a location report led to a long series of checks. In many cases, those checks led to the strike being called off.
The film turns an intelligence alert into an order to fire. The system's name supplies the drama in place of the missing evidence, and the account does not fit the process strikes actually go through.
Interviewee: "The claim about human shields and homes is ridiculous. It's simply not true. We bomb them in their homes because that's how we find them."
The interviewee presents two facts as mutually exclusive: that intelligence located Hamas operatives at home, and that Hamas operated among civilians and used their presence for protection.
What the film leaves outIn its effort to portray the IDF as monstrous, the film loses sight of the reality on the ground. Terrorists, weapons, and hostages were indeed found in residential buildings and civilian facilities, including hospitals, schools, UN facilities, and mosques. For those familiar with Gaza and Hamas's methods, this was a fundamental feature of the battlefield. It is part of Hamas's way of fighting.
Hamas's operation among civilians was a basic fact of the war and a central reason for the enormous effort the IDF invested in reducing civilian harm. It also explains the constant proximity of Hamas operatives to civilians, why the review process was difficult, and why so many resources went into it. These are issues the film chooses to ignore.
To present the presence of civilians as an Israeli choice, the film systematically erases Hamas's own choices about how to fight, contradicting the reality on the ground. A familiar feature of the war is declared "ridiculous" and simply written out of the story.
Interviewer: "And there wasn't a single person around you who... questioned it?"
Interviewee: "Not a single person."
Elsewhere in the film:
Interviewee: "This really produced a lot of mistakes... and that concerned the intelligence community from a professional standpoint."
The words "not a single person" are used to portray a uniformly obedient military in which no one had doubts.
What the film leaves outIn the strike coordination rooms I knew, disagreements among the various participants were routine. The target approval process brought together different bodies with sometimes nearly opposing priorities, and after-action reviews followed. Even NAZA itself acknowledges, in the testimony quoted above, that errors caused professional concern within the intelligence community.
There were countless disagreements over strike approvals. Some ended with a plan being changed, postponed, or canceled. Significant debates also took place beyond the view of Unit 8200 personnel: among strike planners, specialists assessing civilian presence, legal advisers, air force personnel, and the hostage headquarters.
The interviewee may not have heard disagreements within his own team, although I find even that difficult to reconcile with my experience. That is a long way from establishing that "not a single person" anywhere in the system objected. I am convinced the filmmakers understood the distinction. The film erases it because its narrative requires an army with no debate, no checks and balances, and no one willing to say no.
Interviewee: "NAZA. The strikes I remember, 200. A senior figure, we don't really know where he's staying. And every place we suspect he might pass through in his day-to-day life, we'll bomb. And we're talking about large areas. Let's say, from here to that building over there, we attack all of it. An entire neighborhood."
Elsewhere:
Interviewee: "The basic unit is a house. The IDF's system is organized by building. There's a number, simply a serial number for every house. A person for each house? Yes."
Interviewer: "Is that for each floor or each building?"
Interviewee: "Each building."
Interviewer: "Each building."
Interviewee: "Yes, and then if they specify a floor, they narrow it down to, say, building 6351, seventh floor."
The phrase "an entire neighborhood" is presented as a factual description of how the military operated, without a location, date, target, list of buildings, or account of what happened.
What the film leaves outBased on everything I know, this is not how the IDF operated. Even the film itself describes, elsewhere, a system that identifies individual buildings and specific floors. That does not prove every strike was precise. It does show that the process dealt with defined targets and structures, which makes the interviewee's account very difficult to reconcile with how the system worked.
In the processes I took part in, concern about excessive harm severely limited strikes over broad areas. The discussions always focused on a particular target, at a particular time, using a particular method.
This account does not match the operational reality I knew. Without a location, a date, or further details, the phrase "an entire neighborhood" carries the entire argument. An image the viewer cannot verify is presented as evidence of the military's approach.
Interviewee: "I remember the pressure, and I remember the phone, like a conference call of that kind, on speaker like that, with the air force, and I don't remember who else. Everyone was saying, '8200, do we have approval? 8200, do you approve?' We got confused with the software, and we were under pressure. We couldn't find it. We just couldn't find the GPS location we needed. It was taking time, and it was already 8:06 or something. They kept saying time was passing: it was set for eight in the morning, so it had to happen at eight. Then, when we found it, they were saying, 'Yes, yes, we have approval.' And there really was a strike. The next day they found out that he and his whole family had been killed in his home."
The passage makes the word "approval" sound as though Unit 8200 personnel decided to attack the man and his family.
What the film leaves outThe filmmakers rely on the fact that most viewers are unfamiliar with how strikes are approved. The account itself describes a search for GPS data and confirmation that the person was at a particular location. That is an intelligence function. It is not the decision that the person is a military target, much less the final authorization to strike.
Someone responsible for confirming a location may not have access to the intelligence establishing the person's status as a target, the operational considerations, the assessment of civilian presence, or the decisions of senior commanders. Even this account explicitly mentions the air force and other sources being involved.
The film presents confirmation of a location as permission to kill. That is not how the process works. It is exactly the confusion on which the film's argument depends.
My concern goes beyond the film's manipulations and misleading claims. Watching the filmmakers defend their work in interviews, I am left with the impression that they recognize how weak and open to challenge many of their allegations are, and that this is why they rely so heavily on cinematic technique and emotional impact. Reviewing the testimony has strengthened my conviction that the film was made to deliberately mislead audiences, in Israel and especially abroad, and damage Israel's standing, rather than establish the truth.
NAZA's central claim is not that mistakes were made during the war or that terrible incidents occurred. It is that this was the system: an automated process that reduced civilians to numbers and let technology decide who lived or died. To make that case, the film turns estimates into outcomes, location reports into authorizations, a database into a kill list, and one participant's account into a description of the entire system.
I do not see a random series of mistakes. I see a consistent editorial choice: manipulation carried out with considerable cinematic skill. Whenever the full process would complicate the story, it disappears. Whenever an anonymous statement can shock, it stays. When the accounts contradict one another, the film does not pause. It moves to the next scene, leaving emotion to make the case that the evidence cannot.
In the rooms where I took part in these discussions, I saw strikes changed, postponed, and canceled because of civilians and other considerations. The film is entitled to criticize those decisions. It cannot credibly claim to have exposed the system while omitting almost everyone who operated it, reviewed it, placed limits on it, and sometimes stopped it. It may be skillful filmmaking, but this is not investigative journalism. It looks far more like propaganda.
Even if some of the testimony describes deeply troubling events, the film does not use those accounts to establish what happened. It uses them as raw material for a predetermined conclusion. NAZA's creators did not uncover how the strike process worked. I see little sign that they were interested in doing so. Instead, they chose the most damaging portrayal possible, ignored numerous facts, and cut away the parts of reality that did not fit their story.
This is not an investigation that led to a conclusion. In my judgment, it is a deliberate smear dressed up as an investigation.
An example of the process described above: a decision to halt or redirect a strike in real time, before it is carried out.
In an interview with Ayala Hasson, Miron addressed similar claims and was asked directly about the film and the strike approval process.
Matir Asurim takes readers inside the intelligence effort to find and bring home the hostages after October 7 - and the decisions people had to make with incomplete information, including the hour-long deliberations behind strikes like the ones described above.