‘NAZA’ documentary misrepresents Gaza targeting process, Military official to i24NEWS

A military official has given the core criticisms of the documentary 'NAZA' by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. They noted that although it had not seen the full film, its criticism is based on the accounts of viewers and a representative who was at the screening, as well as press coverage and the filmmakers' public statements.

The core issue they lay out is that the interviewees only had access to a single stage in the intelligence process and as a result can recount only the preliminary intelligence stage of the process.

Targeting is a seven-stage process and they claim that the interviewees were all serving in the first stage with no access to later stages.

The first stage is intelligence analysis: analysts gather and cross-reference a variety of intelligence sources. Then, in stage two, intelligence verification, a separate intelligence officer verifies the material and decides whether to designate it for targeting.

Stage three is operational planning, non-intelligence military staff decide on munitions, timing and desired effect.

Independent military legal advisers then review the plan and assess its legality, impose conditions, or return the plan for further planning. The legal review is stage four.

In stage five, the command decision, operational commanders weigh expected civilian harm against military advantage; they then approve, restrict, or reject the strike. The official clarified that "Analysts don't sit at his table."

In stage six, real-time assessment, additional surveillance or intelligence is checked before the strike and can lead to the strike being reworked or cancelled entirely.

Following the strike, a post-strike review is held. In stage seven, a separate unit, divorced from the previous stages, assesses the outcomes and provides reports on them.

A military official explained that an analyst in the initial stage may have a high estimate for civilian casualties and assume that a strike occurred on the basis of that figure, but that later steps can significantly reduce that estimate, such as "narrowing the target, changing the weapon or timing, or updated evacuation data after warnings."

They laid out three key issues with the methodology. First, there is no verification: the film provides no way to verify any of the information in it. The filmmakers failed to put their allegations to the IDF prior to publication, which denied the IDF a right of reply, and the filmmakers continued to refuse to provide the IDF with a copy or details about the incidents. The film also failed to provide any context or mitigation for its claims.

The official also laid out several responses to specific allegations raised in the film. The official said that no strike with 500 civilian casualties was ever planned, approved, or carried out. The official also disputed that there was a set number of casualties allowed for junior and senior commanders. The official clarified that the interviewee likely confused an authorization threshold, which requires higher command levels to sign off on a strike, with permission for that number of casualties.

The offical also said that AI is not used to produce lists of targets or approve strikes and that no strike was carried out "by algorithm." The official responded to several other allegations by saying that intelligence analysts would not have access to the later stages at all.