A toddler held as cover in a school screening line

One officer, one school, one child

A staff officer who says he spent almost two years inside Gaza, in every sector, sits in front of the camera in the film and describes how Hamas uses civilians as human shields. One case stays with him. It involves a child of three or four.

Naza: The Real Story is a 41-minute Israeli documentary released on 30 September 2026 by Roi Danino, Ariel Averbuch and Hagay Gutman. It is built on interviews with commanders and intelligence officers, combat footage and captured material; the officers sit with their backs to the camera and are identified by role, not by name, this officer among them. The film it answers is NAZA by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. The Free Press recorded that NAZA premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on 10 September 2026, won the Special Jury Prize, and consists of anonymous testimony about Israeli targeting in Gaza; The New York Times likewise described interviews with unidentified Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers. That is the real difference. Neither film names its officers. The other film asks you to accept accusations of a targeting policy on testimony alone. Ours puts an officer’s role and time on the ground on screen, next to footage and documents you can check against him. The burden of proof belongs to the accuser. We bring the evidence anyway.

The child in the line

In one operation, the officer says, intelligence indicated that Nukhba terrorists were inside a school being used as a humanitarian shelter. Nukhba is the name Israel uses for Hamas’s elite force; the IDF has identified Nukhba commanders as taking part in the massacres in southern Israel on 7 October 2023. Forces saw a man holding a child of about three or four, he says, and moved the man forward in the line because of the child. The man, according to the officer, was a Hamas terrorist who had taken part in the 7 October attack. The child was his cover. Soldiers separated the child, passed him to women nearby, and detained the man.

Think about what that move requires: a terrorist who is sure the soldiers in front of him will not risk a toddler. He bet on their restraint. That is the whole method.

The law, and Hamas in its own words

The incident is his testimony. The rule it breaks is not in dispute. Additional Protocol I, Article 51(7), as quoted by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says the presence or movements of civilians “shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.” Israel’s 2009 Gaza operation report records the same prohibition as a core rule of customary law, binding on states and non-state actors alike. The U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual, cited in the same FDD analysis, puts responsibility for injury to human shields on the party that uses them, although the attacker may share it if it fails to take feasible precautions.

Hamas has said so openly. CAMERA records that in 2008 Fathi Hammad, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, said Arabs in Gaza had “created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the Jihad fighters against the Zionist bombing machine.” Israel’s 2009 Gaza report cites the same Al-Aqsa TV appearance of 29 February 2008 and describes Israeli footage from that war of civilians gathering on rooftops after warning calls, and of terrorists moving among children after launching rockets. A toddler in a screening line is a different technique from a crowd on a roof. The logic is identical: exploit an army that is bound, by law and by its own lawyers, to hold fire when a civilian is in the frame.

Schools, clothes and civilian sites

The officer’s school story sits inside a record that does not depend on him. In January 2024 the IDF said soldiers found a rifle hidden under a child’s bed, a terror tunnel near a school and a rocket launcher near a kindergarten in Khan Younis. UN Watch has compiled IDF accounts from this war of fire from schools, weapons stored in school compounds, and a reserve brigade commander’s January 2024 statement that weapons were found in every school, mosque and kindergarten his unit searched. Hamas and some humanitarian organizations reject Israel’s broader claim that schools and hospitals were systematically turned into command nodes. Notice what they argue about: scale and intent. Not whether weapons were found in schools.

The officer says Hamas terrorists had uniforms and did not fight in them. They wore civilian clothes, sometimes without a vest, and left weapons in houses. The Washington Institute has described the same wartime pattern: Izz al-Din al-Qassam terrorists who appear in camouflage in peacetime are, in war, typically dressed in civilian clothing with weapons hidden. He says terrorists used civilian density and humanitarian sites as cover. He describes a tunnel shaft under an infant’s crib, fighting equipment in children’s rooms, and schools and hospitals used as headquarters. He describes movement in civilian cars or on foot, and carts with sacks that looked like flour and hid weapons or turned out to be explosive charges; some sacks, he says, carried UNRWA logos. He describes a living room with hate literature, Mein Kampf among it, then weapons, then a tunnel shaft. He says hostages were held inside a dense population, and that returned hostages confirmed it.

The IDF has published footage of tunnel shafts in civilian homes and of command positions under Gaza City, and FDD has described Hamas tunnels running beneath civilian infrastructure. A Jewish Virtual Library summary of a 2025 Henry Jackson Society report treats the tunnel network, combat in civilian clothes, and military assets placed among homes, schools and hospitals as parts of one human-shield method. That matches the officer’s account. It does not, on its own, prove any single house or school, and we do not claim it does.

Rules on opening fire

Now the other side of the line. He says legal officers sit at every level and the rule is simple: if there is doubt, there is no shot. He says many strikes were cancelled, on armed terrorists too, from the air and in direct fire, to avoid harming others. He says the IDF does not fire on a school where people are gathered, and that in his time in Gaza he does not recall fire on uninvolved people. Areas with a possible hostage, he says, were no-fire or no-entry zones even with armed Hamas cells in view, and civilians were kept in place for the same reason.

Israel’s published account of its rules after 7 October 2023 is more formal. In a legal response reproduced by the Jewish Virtual Library, Israel states that the IDF has built the law of armed conflict into operations through legal training, procedures, ongoing legal advice to command, and mechanisms to investigate alleged misconduct, and that it applies distinction, precautions and proportionality in carrying out attacks. The same text says commanders must judge expected civilian harm and military advantage on the facts as understood at the time, and that an attack which later causes more incidental damage than expected is not, by that result alone, unlawful. Those are strict rules of engagement, and they are the army’s stated standard; a standard does not prove every strike met it. Now look at what the accusers count on: the Hamas-run Health Ministry’s figures, which FDD notes do not separate terrorists from civilians in their headline totals, set against Israeli estimates that a large share of those killed were terrorists. Which number would you build a verdict on?

Food, aid and what one interview can carry

He says he did not see famine and saw a lot of food. He says Hamas seized aid trucks from the first day and used the goods to strengthen itself, that terrorists stood on trucks and kept civilians away, and that some goods were cigarettes and narghile tobacco rather than staple food.

That is contested ground, and the record shows why. In July 2025 CNN reported an internal USAID review of partner-reported incidents that found “no indication that there was a systemic loss due to Hamas interference or theft or diversion.” In August 2025 the Washington Free Beacon reported that USAID’s inspector general was compiling evidence of Hamas commandeering aid trucks and diverting goods, and was investigating “credible allegations of Hamas interference, diversion, and theft.” Fox News later reported the same inspector-general work, including allegations of smuggling through aid shipments. A review of what partners chose to report is one thing. An inspector general’s open investigation is another. Read both next to a soldier who was there.

A terrorist who hides behind a three-year-old is not a hard case for the soldier facing him. He is the case against everyone who blames that soldier. Hamas and humanitarian organizations tell several of these stories differently; this officer tells his on camera. Watch the full interview in Naza: The Real Story, free online with English subtitles, and judge for yourself.