Now that the IDF has actually been able to see the film NAZA in its entirety, it has responded point-by-point to the charges made by the filmmakers, the anti-Israeli Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. That response can be found here: “IDF gives rejection of ‘NAZA’ film claims, disputes civilian death ratios, AI targeting abuse,” by Yonah Jeremy Bob, Jerusalem Post, October 1, 2026:
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.
Only after viewing the movie did the IDF feel it could provide a more comprehensive, point-by-point response.
The core of the IDF’s response is to reject three powerful elements of the NAZA film, which was produced in conjunction with British outlet The Guardian: Specific rejections of all of the movie’s claims about combatant-civilian ratios for targeting, rejecting claims that the IDF used AI abusively to kill more civilians, and categorizing the IDF intelligence interviewees as being experts in a middle step of the targeting process, who know much less about the final step.
Regarding the combatant-civilian targeting ratio, the IDF rejected the film’s claims that there was an attack with a 500-to-1 civilian-combatant kill ratio and claims that there were frequent attacks with 200-to-1 ratios against senior Hamas officials and frequent attacks of 20-to-1 ratios against junior Hamas officials….
The Israeli journalist Yonah Jeremy Bob, who reported above on the IDF response to NAZA, then ends by taking issue with what he claims is a singular lapse in the IDF’s presentation:
Despite all of the IDF’s responses, it has still failed to give an on-record discussion of its actual combatant-civilian casualty ratios.
Further, the IDF has not truly addressed the vast cumulative number of civilian casualties from the Israel-Hamas War.
While around 25,000 of those killed in Gaza were Hamas, according to IDF estimates, and anecdotally 3,000-5,000 more were Palestinians killed by Hamas rocket misfires or crackdowns on opposition, that still leaves a likely 40,000 or more killed Gazan civilians.vilians.
In response to this supposed lapse in the IDF , we can note the following: According to Hamas, 73,500 people have died in Gaza since the war began. 25,000 of these were, according to the IDF, Hamas terrorists. Between 3,000 and 5,000 Gazans died from rocket misfires by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or Hamas killed them for opposing its rule. But a key item has been left out. In the years before the war, about 8,000 people died in Gaza each year from accidents and disease. There is no reason to think that number would have changed, so that, in the three years of the war in Gaza, 24,000 of the recorded deaths were not combat-related.
Now let us do the math:
73,500 total deaths in Gaza according to Hamas, from which we subtract 25,000 Hamas deaths, equals 48,500. We then must deduct, as an absolute minimum, 3,000 Gazans who died not from IDF fire, but from Hamas and IDF rockets that misfired, or whom Hamas killed for opposing its rule, including Hamas’ theft of a large part of the humanitarian aid sent to Gaza.
That leaves 45,500 dead, but 24,000 of those deaths were attributable, based on historical data, to accidents and disease. Subtracting that number brings us to a total of 21,500 civilians killed as a result of the fighting. Now we can arrive at the civilian-to-combatant ratio that the IDF, in its response to NAZA, did not provide. That is 21,500 civilians killed: 25,000 Hamas combatants killed, or a ratio of civilian-to-combatant of less than 1:1. The UN has said that in all the wars fought since 1945, the civilian-to-combatant ratio has on average been 9:1. In Afghanistan, the ratio was 4:1 and in Iraq 3:1. But no military in the world has come close to Israel’s feat in Gaza, managing to achieve a civilian-to-combatant ratio of slightly less than 1:1. The IDF should now provide that as an addendum to its critique of NAZA.
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