Who made Gaza hospitals and homes targets? - opinion

ByMICHA DANZIGOCTOBER 22, 2026 16:00

In a Gaza neighborhood, beside a playground built with UNRWA money and flying a Hamas flag, sacks of rice and flour stamped with United Nations markings were stacked into a fighting fortification like sandbags.

Next door, according to an IDF commander who fought there, stood a Hamas training compound and a kindergarten. Inside the kindergarten, troops found weapons and photographs of small children in Hamas uniforms. A tunnel shaft had been dug into the kindergarten’s yard. When Israeli forces moved in, two Hamas gunmen emerged from that shaft and hit them with an RPG. Five soldiers were wounded.

This was the same war in which Israel stood accused, in newsrooms, at the United Nations, and in The Hague, of starving Gaza by design. In that compound, the food had arrived. Hamas used it for cover.

The scene comes from NAZA: The Real Story, the reply to NAZA, the Guardian-produced documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor that took the Special Jury Prize at Venice. Three Israelis made the counter-film in under two weeks with their own money: Lt.-Col. (res.) Roi Danino, attorney and reservist Ariel Averbuch, and director Hagay Gutman.

A film made that fast has rough edges. But it puts IDF soldiers and officers who fought in Gaza on camera, and it backs their accounts with footage of Hamas weapons and military infrastructure in hospitals, mosques, and schools.

I wrote here last month about how NAZA recast Israel’s lawful collateral damage calculations as something nefarious. This piece concerns the half of the story it ignores. The Guardian’s documentary asks how Israel decided whether to strike. It never asks who decided where the target would be.

The war against Hamas

The answer is on the map, where the terrorist leaders who launched these wars of choice were finally found.

On September 27, 2024, Israeli jets killed Hassan Nasrallah in Hezbollah’s headquarters, a bunker beneath apartment towers in Beirut’s Dahiyeh suburb. He chose that spot knowing what the footage of any strike on him would look like.

On May 13, 2025, an Israeli strike killed Mohammed Sinwar, Hamas’s military chief in Gaza, along with its Rafah Brigade commander, Muhammad Shabana. Troops later found the compound directly beneath the emergency room of the EU-funded European Hospital in Khan Yunis. Hamas built its command center under that ER.

Mohammed Sinwar was no bystander to his brother’s war. He helped plan the 2006 abduction of Gilad Schalit, part of the template for October 7. He was central to building the Rafah tunnel network, where Hamas hid fighters, weapons, and hostages under a city that sheltered more than a million displaced Gazans.

He spent his last months underground, under a hospital, betting Israel would not find him or strike the building above him. Israel found him and aimed at the bunker, not the wards. Gaza’s Health Ministry still reported 28 dead. It did not say who built the bunker or how many of the dead were Hamas operatives, and it never mentioned Sinwar or Shabana. Its tolls don’t distinguish its fighters from civilians.

Sinwar’s brother Yahya, the architect of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led invasion and massacres, died on October 16, 2024, in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan neighborhood, inside a family home whose owner had evacuated months earlier.

Nearby, seven weeks before, Hamas executed Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, and Almog Sarusi in a tunnel whose shaft opened inside a child’s bedroom in another family’s home, its walls painted with Snow White and Mickey Mouse.

An apartment block, a hospital, a family’s home. Each was chosen in advance by men who understood that their neighbors’ bodies were their best armor.

Hamas imprisoned its hostages with the same logic. Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv were rescued in June 2024 from family apartments in Nuseirat in central Gaza. Noa Marciano, 19, was murdered by a Hamas-affiliated doctor inside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

Sharon Aloni Cunio said she and her three-year-old twins, Emma and Yuli, were held in a Khan Yunis hospital. The bodies of Shani Louk, Amit Buskila, Itzhak Gelerenter, and Ron Benjamin were recovered from a tunnel reached through a shaft inside a house in Jabalia. Emily Damari said after her release that Hamas held her in UNRWA facilities.

Criticism of 'NAZA'

The Guardian asks viewers to trust 24 interviewees whose names and faces they never see. Everything above rests on names, dates, and addresses any reporter can check. The record of where Hamas put its leaders and captives requires no trust at all.

NAZA treats every civilian death, and even every calculation meant to avoid one, as an entry in the ledger against Israel. It never opens Hamas’s books. Who dug the shaft in the kindergarten yard? While others pushed the starvation libel, who stacked UN bags of rice into a wall? The film never asks, and a documentary that will not ask obvious questions has stopped documenting.

International law requires asking these questions. Hamas chose this war on October 7, then built its strategy around erasing the line the law of war exists to draw. That law requires fighters to distinguish themselves from civilians and treats feigning civilian status as perfidy.

Hamas fighters stored their uniforms after October 7 and fought in civilian clothes, a choice no military makes for comfort.

The law forbids using civilians to shield military targets. Hamas put shafts in kindergarten yards, weapons in schools, anti-tank missiles under a children’s rug, and a command center beneath an emergency room. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, a hospital used for acts harmful to the other side loses its protection.

International law bars armed groups from using anyone under 18 in hostilities and makes using children under 15 a war crime. NAZA: The Real Story shows children carrying weapons to Hamas fighters in broad daylight.

The same law obliges Israel to verify its targets, estimate the civilian toll before every strike, and call off any attack whose expected harm would be excessive relative to the military gain. NAZA presents Israel’s legal compliance as confession. And the law holds the side that hides behind civilians responsible for what follows. Collateral damage requires collateral, and Hamas put it there by design.

Hamas built its war so that every Israeli strike would leave civilian bodies, and every casualty would become an indictment of Israel. But that strategy works only with media accomplices. Abraham, Szor, and the Guardian did that job, and Venice gave them a prize for it.

Micha Danzig is a contributing opinion writer for The Jerusalem Post and other Jewish publications, as well as an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former New York Police Department officer.

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