The creators of the recent documentary dealing with the topic of "Naza" (a Hebrew military acronym for Nezek Agavi - collateral damage) did not have to work too hard to discover the truth.
They could have simply interviewed me. I would have stood in front of the camera, without hiding my identity, on the roof of my house located nine kilometers from Lebanon, after we absorbed endless barrages of rockets here, and explained the reality on the ground to them.
A little less than 20 years ago, I was one of the founders of the field within the IDF that deals with warning populations on the other side of enemy lines and preserving the lives of their civilians.
We built the work processes that define how to call upon the population to evacuate, and how to track that evacuation. I was personally involved in formulating the target approval processes and operational discussions.
If they had spoken with me, I would have explained to them that the chart shown at the beginning of the film is not a chart for conducting killings, but rather a planning chart for a target identified as being used by Hamas.
Its purpose is to determine whether to strike a target at all, who in the command echelon is authorized to approve it, with what munitions, and under what conditions. In stark contrast to what is stated in the film, when the words "Naza 500 – collateral damage estimated at 500" appear in the approval process, the meaning is that action must be taken to reduce the collateral damage.
There are a variety of ways to do this, such as a call for evacuation, precision munitions, or canceling the strike entirely (what is known as an unapproved target). Noting the collateral damage on the target sheet does not signify an intention to carry out the killing of civilians or a "genocide"; it is intended, first and foremost, to prevent it.
Our enemies, both Hamas and Hezbollah, deliberately plant their rockets and headquarters in the heart of the civilian population, in tunnels under Beirut or in high-rise residential buildings in southern Lebanon. Hamas in Gaza did the same, using children as human shields. They do this based on the working assumption that if Israel strikes without warning, 500 civilians will be killed. That is exactly their goal. But Israel chooses differently: there are at least hundreds of soldiers and officers in the IDF whose entire role is the protection of the enemy's population. That is what they think about when they wake up in the morning. This is what the IDF pays them a salary for.
If the editors of the film had wanted to conduct serious research, they could have interviewed former (like me) and present IDF soldiers and officers, who would tell them the truth about collateral damage. But they chose not to do so.
The promo for the film claims that the IDF "never checks the number of civilians killed."
The truth is that checking the exact number of casualties in enemy territory in real-time is a complex and nearly impossible task. This is exactly why the collateral damage assessment process was created in advance, to consider the size of the structure and the routine number of civilians in its vicinity.
The IDF has invested and continues to invest massive resources - intelligence personnel, legal experts, operational personnel from the air and ground forces, and technological experts - to develop command and control systems that accurately reflect where civilians are present and where they are not. I was personally involved in developing these tools during my military service in the Northern Command and during my subsequent reserve service.
From my experience, I can testify that a whole world of intelligence stands behind this effort. In the Intelligence Directorate, there are several desks whose exclusive role is tracking the evacuation percentages of the population from rural and urban areas after the IDF has published warnings. If a high percentage of the population has evacuated following the warnings, the collateral damage assessment drops, and only then is a strike on the terror infrastructure permitted.
But unfortunately, it is precisely the IDF's efforts to preserve the lives of the enemy's population, namely, the evacuation warnings and tracking of the evacuation status, that have been interpreted as "ethnic cleansing" in international media, while ignoring the scope of the terror infrastructure exposed inside and beneath the villages in both Lebanon and Gaza, in every house.
I have been asked several times by reporters why we evacuate such extensive areas. Here is my answer: when Hamas or Hezbollah dig a tunnel network under villages, it is impossible to destroy them without harming the dozens of houses above them. A targeted evacuation of a specific house during a tunnel explosion will result in harm to civilians.
Despite the extensive intelligence efforts invested to ensure that the target is clear of civilians, this is a world where uncertainty is exceedingly high. Intelligence will always be partial and insufficient. There have been many recorded cases where there was no information about the presence of civilians in the terror infrastructure or near the terrorist, and they were killed as a result. This grim outcome cannot erase the fact that efforts to prevent collateral damage are indeed made.
Decision-making on the battlefield is complex, the dilemmas are immense, and the nature of the battlefield is that mistakes are sometimes made. But the difference between us and the enemy is enormous. In contrast to the radical Islamic ideology of Hamas and Hezbollah, who publicly declare that their goal is to kill Israeli civilians (and act accordingly), we state clearly that we have no intention whatsoever of killing civilians in enemy territory, and we even allow the entry of humanitarian aid into the combat zone, despite the fact that this harms our operational achievement in the fight against terrorism.
As parents of soldiers, this is how we educate our children - civilians are not a target. And these children grow up to become the soldiers and officers who serve in the IDF.
It is unfortunate that the filmmakers chose not to conduct real research. Contrary to what is required by journalistic ethics, they even refrained from sending the report to the IDF for comment, so it is impossible to know what roles the interviewees held within the system, and whether their point of view, assuming it is authentic, is even relevant to understanding the chain of approvals and actions taken prior to striking a target.
The filmmakers preferred to tell a story from a very narrow angle, to interview anonymous sources whose level of involvement, rank, and understanding of the process is unclear, and to completely ignore the experts who built these systems with one goal: preserving human life. There are such experts. I was one of them.
Sarit Zehavi
Your eyes and ears on the northern border,
Alma Research and Education Center
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