Israel Defense Forces dispute ‘NAZA’ documentary and identify 170 slain Gazans as terrorists

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have issued a detailed rebuttal to the documentary ‘NAZA’, which alleges that Israeli forces knowingly caused large-scale civilian casualties in Gaza. The film, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, features testimonies from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel. It claims that the military uses AI tools and accepts high civilian death estimates as ‘collateral damage’ (the meaning of the Hebrew acronym NAZA) to target militants.

The IDF describes the documentary as a ‘distorted, misleading and disingenuous picture’ of its targeting processes. The military argues the film conflates preliminary intelligence with final operational and legal decision-making. Specifically, the IDF denied claims that it approved strikes with the expectation of killing up to 500 civilians in a single raid.

In a separate investigation, the IDF released a dossier claiming that 170 individuals killed in Gaza, who were presented internationally as journalists, were actually members of terrorist organizations. According to the military, 118 were affiliated with Hamas and 49 with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The IDF noted that some of these individuals had contributed to international news agencies, though it stated the news organizations themselves were not implicated in the alleged affiliations.