How Israel targets Hamas terrorists in Gaza, step by step

Night on the Tel Aviv roofs

The film Naza: The Real Story, made independently by Roi Danino, Ariel Averbuch and Hagay Gutman, tells the war in Gaza through the IDF officers who took part in it. Senior reserve commanders and intelligence officers speak on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, with their backs to the camera, each identified by the role he held. They describe combat in civilian areas, the difficulty of picking out terrorists among unarmed residents, and the decisions they say they made before a munition was released. This post lays out that targeting process as they and the IDF describe it, and puts the documents next to it. Where others dispute it, we say so, and we ask them to show their evidence.

Where it starts

On 7 October 2023, the terrorist organization Hamas and allied terrorist groups attacked communities in southern Israel. Israeli records later put the death toll from that day at 1,195 people, including 778 civilians, 282 IDF soldiers, 57 police officers and 38 local security officers. Israeli tallies also recorded 251 people taken into Gaza as hostages. Israel then began the campaign the IDF calls Iron Swords. The film covers targeting in that campaign, including nights when hostages were believed to be in the same urban terrain as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The targeting chain

A strike begins with intelligence, according to the IDF and the officers in the film: a name, a phone, captured documents, observation of a building. The identification is checked. A weapon is chosen to fit the target. Legal review weighs the expected harm to civilians and whether a warning is needed. And at several points the strike can be called off: if civilians appear in the frame, or if information about hostages changes.

Now the word that gave both films their title. Coverage of the Venice film explains that “NAZA” comes from nezek agavi, the military term for incidental harm to civilians expected from a strike. Israel’s published account of targeting in this war requires commanders to estimate that harm on the facts as understood at the time, and then decide. Is the strike lawful? Does it need more precautions? Should the plan change? Should it be cancelled? If a strike later causes more incidental damage than was reasonably anticipated, that result does not by itself prove a violation, because the legal test is the commander’s judgement on the information then available, not hindsight. John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Madison Policy Forum, has put it plainly: calculating how much incidental harm the law permits, and then taking further steps to limit it, is a precaution. It is not proof of an intent to kill civilians.

Stop on that for a second. An army that counts the expected harm before it fires is being accused because it counts.

Where feasible, commanders are to consider means equally capable of achieving a defined military objective and choose the option expected to cause the least incidental damage. The American Jewish Committee, writing in November 2023, described an IDF requirement that military lawyers review targeting and strike decisions. Those lawyers sit outside the chain of command of the officers they advise, and Israeli Supreme Court review of operational decisions is available in a way that is unusual among militaries. That alone does not prove every strike in this war met those tests. It does show that the process the officers describe is the process the army says it uses. Anyone who says otherwise has to show where it broke.

Fire near sensitive sites such as mosques, schools and hospitals needs special approval and evidence of military use, the officers say. The IDF’s intended targets are members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, their commanders, and military sites such as launch positions, tunnel shafts and command posts. The IDF publishes its own counts of terrorists killed and disputes casualty figures that do not separate terrorists from civilians. The Hamas-run Health Ministry’s figures are aggregate death totals that make no such distinction. Israel does not treat those totals as a complete census, and neither should you. A count that cannot tell a terrorist from a civilian, issued by a ministry the terrorists run: evidence of what, exactly?

Warnings before the strike

The IDF says it warns first: phone calls, text messages, leaflets, small munitions fired at roofs, and announced evacuation routes. Summaries of IDF practice by AJC and UN Watch record the same methods, including strikes aborted when civilians were still present after a warning. Those methods appear in IDF materials on minimising civilian harm and were used again after October 2023. Why does an army have to call a building before it strikes? Because, as Israeli officials say, Hamas places military assets in dense residential areas and near hospitals and schools. Israel’s published targeting account describes neighbourhoods converted into combat complexes, with tunnel shafts in and around civilian buildings. Under the law of armed conflict, hospitals lose protection if they are used, outside their humanitarian function, to commit acts harmful to the enemy. Whether a given hospital or school had lost that protection in a given week is a question of fact, decided strike by strike.

A U.S. State Department report on Israel’s use of American arms recorded humanitarian organisations saying that some notices were too short or too vague, and that areas designated as safer often lacked adequate shelter. The same report recorded Hamas’s embedding in civilian and humanitarian infrastructure, and stated that U.S. intelligence had “no direct indication of Israel intentionally targeting civilians.” The officers in the film do not pretend a war in a dense city is clean. They say it produces civilian deaths, and that the process was built to limit them. That is the line between the two sides: one builds a process to spare civilians, the other digs its tunnel shafts in and around their buildings.

Hostages on the same map

The officers describe the hunt for hostages as part of the same nights of work. The possible presence of a hostage, they say, can change or cancel a strike. Military recoveries in that period include Ori Megidish on 30 October 2023, and Fernando Marman and Louis Har in February 2024, in a Rafah raid the IDF said was based on intelligence from the Military Intelligence Directorate and the Israel Security Agency. On 8 June 2024, in Operation Arnon, Israeli security forces recovered Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv from civilian houses in Nuseirat, where the army said terrorists were guarding them. Other hostages came home in deals. Israel said the captives were held inside a populated camp. That is the terrain the officers had to work in. Read how the IDF finds hostages.

On aid, COGAT is the Israeli body that coordinates humanitarian access and logs trucks entering Gaza. Israeli officials and aid organisations describe that system differently. The details are in Hamas and humanitarian aid.

Two films, one word

Naza: The Real Story was released on 30 September 2026 with English subtitles. The other film, “Naza” by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, premiered at Venice on 10 September 2026, won the Special Jury Prize and takes its title from the same acronym. It relied on anonymous soldier testimony filmed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops. The IDF dismissed the claims raised in it. Spencer has argued that the Venice film illustrates how measures meant to enforce the laws of war, including the calculation of expected incidental harm, can themselves be presented as evidence of wrongdoing. That is the move to watch for: take the safeguard and present it as the crime.

Our film does not claim to be a full account of the war, and it does not include the views of civilians in Gaza or of Hamas. It gives you the officers who made the calls and the rules they made them under. An accusation needs evidence. This is ours.

The chain, and the burden of proof

Intelligence, identification, legal review, warning, and the option to abort: that is the chain. Whoever wants to call it something else carries the burden of showing where it failed. Watch the officers explain it in their own words.