The IDF says highly trained human operatives, not artificial intelligence, make targeting decisions. The Jerusalem Post reported that air force operations and legal military officials are involved in those decisions, even as a film called NAZA claims the military has handed over its discretion to AI. The machinery may be dressed up in technical language, but the chain of command stays human. So does the body count.
The State's Monopoly
The Post said the IDF rejects claims of astronomical ratios of 100 or 500 civilians per Hamas terrorists, calling them nowhere near reality and saying the ratios are much lower. It also reported that the military believes the film is manipulating the public by using the acronym NAZA, which stands for “collateral damage,” and that the point of injecting that term into every attack is to show that, unlike Hamas, the IDF is always trying to reduce harm to civilians as a basic tenet of its formula. That is the official story: a state armed force presenting itself as the careful manager of civilian death, not its author.
The article said the laws of war do not require a ratio of zero dead civilians, or fewer dead civilians than combatants. It said proportionality calculations are highly elastic and depend on the specific circumstances, the value of the concrete military goal, the harm to civilians and how viable it is to warn civilians to leave beforehand. Elastic is doing a lot of work there. So is “proportionality.” The rules bend around the strike, not the other way around.
When the Strike Zone Moves
The Post also reported that in some cases the air force redirected missiles away from Hamas terrorists after firing them when civilians unexpectedly appeared close to the strike zone. That detail matters because it shows the operation is not a clean machine. It’s a human system making split-second choices inside a structure built for organized violence, then calling the result precision.
The article said the IDF acknowledges that mistakes can happen in complex operations, including the rescue of hostage Noa Argamani in June 2024. In that operation, the rescue vehicle carrying Argamani, other hostages and IDF soldiers out of a Hamas-controlled area got stuck and could not continue the escape. The IDF had minutes to save the rescuers lest all of the hostages and rescue soldiers be quickly surrounded and killed. The language is clinical. The situation wasn’t.
Who Gets Managed, Who Gets Explained Away
The Post said IDF sources had previously told it and other media that more mistakes were made in that operation regarding nearby civilians than would have been made had the operation continued as planned. That’s the kind of sentence that sits there with no comfort in it. Nearby civilians become a category of error, folded into a rescue operation already trapped inside a Hamas-controlled area and a military logic that treats every move as a calculation.
The article also said the IDF believes the 24 presumed IDF soldiers interviewed for the NAZA movie did not speak to higher IDF levels who might have contextualized the issues they were confronting. That’s the familiar hierarchy at work: lower-level testimony, higher-level framing, and the institution deciding which version of events gets to count as context.
Yonah Jeremy Bob wrote the article, which was published September 14, 2026, at 21:25 and updated September 14, 2026, at 23:21. The facts on the page don’t offer a clean moral exit. They show a military insisting its violence is measured, lawful and human-led, while civilians remain the ones forced to live inside the measurements.