An anti-tank charge under a child's bed: how Hamas uses Gaza homes

What the commander found

Picture a child's room in Gaza. Smurf dolls on the rug. A bed. Now lift the bed. Under it, an anti-tank charge.

That is what one reserve commander describes in Naza: The Real Story. His force entered the house after seeing a Hamas flag outside. In the children's room, he says, they lifted the bed and found the charge. In the parents' room, he says, a crate of 30 mortar shells stood next to a baby's crib.

He does not describe it as an exception. In his account, it is the method of the terrorist organization Hamas.

Who is speaking

Naza: The Real Story is a Hebrew documentary with English subtitles, made by Roi Danino, Ariel Averbuch and Hagay Gutman with the cooperation of senior IDF commanders. The Jerusalem Post called it a counter-film aimed at the claims in NAZA. The speakers are Israeli officers who state what they did and what they saw. The officers are filmed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops with their backs to the camera and identified by role, not by name. Next to their words, the film puts photos, footage and documents that it says were cleared for publication.

What they describe goes far beyond one bedroom. Weapons and infrastructure inside civilian buildings: homes, including a children's room, a kindergarten yard, mosques, schools and a hospital. They name Shifa hospital. They describe rooms they call a Hamas training camp and an explosives lab, and a tunnel shaft under a child's crib or behind a room.

The public record says the same

Don't take the officers' word alone. Check it against what was published long before the film.

On 21 November 2023 the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center recorded the IDF as saying that its fighters had found a cache of weapons and an anti-tank missile hidden under a child's bed in a civilian house, and that weapons had also been found in children's rooms in residences north of Jabalia. On 6 January 2024 the same institute recorded the IDF as saying that, in a private house in the Khan Yunis area, large quantities of weapons used by Hamas terrorists were found in a bedroom next to dolls and children's games. On 10 January 2024 the Foundation for Defense of Democracies reported the IDF as saying that soldiers had found a rifle hidden under a child's bed and other weapons in civilian homes, and that a terror tunnel had been discovered near a school and a rocket launcher near a kindergarten in Khan Younis.

Not one house, not one brigade

In November 2023 the IDF said a Hamas drone factory in a residential building in northern Gaza included explosives and operational plans next to a children's bedroom. In July 2024, during scans in Tel al-Sultan and Shabura in Rafah, the IDF said the 401st Armored Brigade located a tunnel shaft, a large number of weapons and night vision equipment inside a children's bedroom in a civilian building. In late August 2024 the Meir Amit center recorded the IDF as saying that forces in Deir al-Balah had found weapons in a room with a crib.

On 11 April 2025, as IDF forces encircled Rafah after taking the Morag Axis, the Meir Amit center recorded the IDF as saying that a tunnel shaft had been discovered in a compound previously used as a kindergarten, and that a tunnel about twenty metres deep, used as a staging point for attacks and linked to other tunnels, had been destroyed. The film describes a tunnel shaft in a kindergarten yard in Rafah. Same kind of find. The January 2024 rocket launcher near a kindergarten in Khan Younis sits beside the film's account of fire from near a kindergarten.

International reporters who enter Gaza with the IDF do so under military escort. Hamas grants no equivalent access to its underground network. Even so, the public releases document military stores and shafts in rooms built for children.

An old playbook

The method is older than this war. Israel's 2009 report on the Gaza operation, preserved by the Jewish Virtual Library, described Hamas launching rockets from near schools, using hospitals as bases, storing weapons in mosques and booby-trapping neighbourhoods. A later summary of a Henry Jackson Society study, also carried by that library, describes tunnel shafts hidden in civilian buildings and even in children's bedrooms.

Hamas has long denied using civilians as human shields. Then who put the anti-tank missile under the child's bed? The IDF photographed it. It is not a cinematic invention.

The law is clear. Customary international law, as set out in that 2009 report, forbids using the presence or movements of civilians to render points or areas immune from military operations, in particular to shield military objectives from attack. The same rules require each party, to the extent feasible, to avoid placing military objectives within or near densely populated areas. The Washington Institute has argued that Hamas militarized civilian buildings as command posts, weapons stores, fighting positions and rocket-launch sites, a choice that raises the risk to civilians and the political cost of any Israeli strike. So the burden is not on the commander. He is describing a method other institutions had already recorded.

Terrorists in civilian clothes

Interviewees say Hamas terrorists took off uniforms and combat vests and moved between buildings like civilians. In one account a terrorist was dressed as a hostage. They say terrorists fired from places like a kindergarten, and describe one such fight in which five soldiers were wounded. They say hostages were held inside civilian homes. The weapons waited in the homes. The terrorists moved outside dressed as civilians.

Why does that matter? Because distinction, the core of customary humanitarian law, depends on telling civilians from combatants. Terrorists who fight without distinctive signs erase that line on purpose. The Washington Institute has noted that in wartime, Hamas terrorists who display camouflage and weapons in peacetime are typically dressed in civilian clothing, sometimes even women's clothes, with weapons hidden, forcing Israeli troops to decide under fire whether to shoot or hold fire. The Henry Jackson Society summary treats combat in civilian clothes as a tactic that blurs combatants and civilians. Storing munitions beside a crib turns a civilian room into a military object. Hamas made that choice, not the soldier who found them.

The rules they fought under

The officers describe an army acting under strict rules of engagement. They say the IDF held fire when civilians were present, including during a ceasefire episode. A strike needs approval that depends on rank. People who are not armed are not targeted. In their words: "when there is doubt, you do not fire." They say sensitive sites such as schools, hospitals, mosques and clinics were marked, and that civilians were warned and told to leave.

The accusers point to the Hamas-run Health Ministry's figures. Those totals do not reliably separate terrorists from civilians, while Israel publishes its own counts of terrorists killed. Critics of the war, and of this film, say high civilian deaths disprove the officers' account. The officers say the opposite: Hamas's placement of weapons in homes and schools is what produces those deaths when Israel strikes military targets. The law does not treat those two claims as equal. A democratic army that targets terrorists, and a terrorist organization that stores mortar shells beside a crib, are not the same kind of actor, even when the result on the ground is tragic.

Bottom line

The film is free, with English subtitles. Watch the commander's account of the bed and the crib. Then set it beside the IDF releases recorded by the Meir Amit center and by FDD: the anti-tank missile under a child's bed, the rifle under a bed in January 2024, the kindergarten-compound shaft in Rafah. The question is not whether a film answering NAZA takes a side. The question is whether the method it shows is real. The public record points the same way. Watch it, and send it to someone who has only heard the accusation.