Israel’s own report on the 2014 Gaza war prints 1 worked target card for a strike on a house, and it lists a family among those present: “The military commander, his family, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives.” The strike was approved on condition of a warning because, the Foreign Ministry report states, the objective was the building and not the people inside. When the target was a person, the same report states, the attack was made without warning, and its example is a commander in a residential home. The documentary NAZA alleges that in the current war people were bombed at home at night in the knowledge that their families would die. The IDF records describe both kinds of strike on a home and publish a worked card only for the first.
Key Findings
- Israel’s own May 2015 report prints one target card, for a strike on 8 July 2014, listing as present “The military commander, his family, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives,” with approval conditional on “an effective advance warning.”
- The 2015 report ties the warning to the objective: the steps were possible because “the objective was the structure (and the weaponry therein) and not any persons inside.”
- Attacks on “a number of individual militants” in 2014 were made “without giving advance warning,” the same report states, and its example is a senior commander struck in “a residential home.”
- Israel’s stated view, in its 2015 report, holds members of Hamas’s military wing to be lawful targets “at all times and in all places,” and the IDF presentation’s definition of a target says nothing about location.
- The IDF gave specific warnings before “more than a thousand” attacks on individual targets in 2014, by its own count; neither that figure nor any other in the records says how many homes were struck without one.
What does NAZA allege about strikes on homes?
NAZA’s 24 anonymous insiders describe, The Guardian reports, potential low-ranking Hamas targets “who were then bombed in their homes at night, in the knowledge attacks would also kill their families.” The Guardian published the allegation as the headline of its interview with the directors: “They know the house they are bombing is full of children.”
The allegation has three parts, and the IDF records speak to each differently. The first is the place: a home. The second is the time: night. The third is knowledge: that a family was inside when the strike was approved. The directors say, as The Guardian quotes them, that their subject is not rogue conduct but “the orders themselves, the policies, the accepted practices,” so the claim is about a pattern rather than a single strike, and the film, as reported, identifies no strike by date or address.
The IDF’s answer, in its own statement of 11 September 2026, is that it “categorically rejects these allegations” and that “Hamas continues to systematically operate from within the civilian environment, embedding its operatives and military infrastructure among the population.” On the IDF’s account, what is struck is military infrastructure placed among civilians; on the film’s, as reported, it is people in their homes at night. The two accounts differ on what was being struck, and on what was known about the people inside.
Treaty law requires one precaution for exactly this case. Article 57(2)(c) of Additional Protocol I says that “effective advance warning shall be given of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit.” Israel is not a party to Additional Protocols I or II; its May 2015 report states that it “abides by their provisions inasmuch as they reflect rules of customary international law.” The IDF records below show when Israel says it gave that warning for a home, and when it says it did not. The Institute has not viewed the film; its content enters here through its producer’s reporting. The counts of families killed in single strikes come from other bodies and are set out separately.
What does the IDF’s worked target card record about a family?
The State of Israel published 1 complete target card for a strike on a house, in its own May 2015 report on the 2014 war, and the same card is the fifteenth slide of the IDF presentation provided to the Institute. It records an arms cache in a Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander’s house in Abasan al-Kabir, struck on 8 July 2014.
The Foreign Ministry report prints the parts the slide covers. Its intelligence panel lists as present at the target “The military commander, his family, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives.” Its operational directives call for a strike by fighter jet to destroy the weapons store “whilst avoiding harm to civilians,” with one bomb. The legal review, visible on the slide, is marked “Conditional,” and the condition is “the provision of an effective advance warning.”
The conditions ticked on the card are real-time visual surveillance, a nighttime strike, an individual warning to civilians in the target and the legal conditions. The box for an individual warning “to civil. in surrounding structures” is not ticked. The night was the commander’s addition, the report states, alongside the recommended surveillance.
So the one card Israel has published for a house records exactly what the film alleges was known: a family inside. It records a different response to that knowledge: a condition that the family be warned before the bomb was released. The Foreign Ministry report states that “the IDF is unaware of any claim of fatality or harm as a result of the attack,” which is its own account. The card is from the 2014 war, published by Israel in 2015, and it is one card out of a total neither record gives. The rest of the presentation it comes from is set out in the Institute’s report on the IDF’s targeting records.
Why did the target card require a warning?
Israel’s Foreign Ministry states the reason in one sentence of its own 2015 report: “Such steps could be taken due to the fact that the objective was the structure (and the weaponry therein) and not any persons inside; thus, it was considered feasible to provide advance warning and to undertake additional precautions in order to ensure that no persons would be harmed as a result of the attack.”
The warning, on that account, was possible because no one inside was the target. The Foreign Ministry report states the same point about the house in its section on residential buildings: the IDF “considered this site a legitimate military target not because” the commander, a member of an organized armed group, “lived there, but because the site was used as an operational planning site and because a large number of weapons had been stored there.” It adds that secondary explosions during the strike “further confirmed that it was a disguised weapons depot.”
The report’s other examples of homes follow the same pattern. A commander’s house used as a command center in Jabalia was struck on 9 July 2014 “only after providing several warnings to civilians, making sure they had evacuated,” with three “roof knocks” first. A multistory building used for command centers was struck on 23 August “after providing several effective advance warnings to the building’s occupants and neighbours” and verifying that it was “fully vacated.” The report states that “No civilians were harmed in the attack.”
Each of these is a strike on a building used for military purposes, warned and emptied first. None is a strike on a person in the building. The report is Israel’s own account of its own conduct in 2014, and the families in these examples are the ones it says were warned out. The strikes the film describes are the other kind.
When does Israel say a home is struck without warning?
Israel’s Foreign Ministry states in its own 2015 report that in 2014 the IDF “attacked a number of individual militants (in which cases, the attack was conducted without giving advance warning).” Its example of the rule is a senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander who “at the time was located in a residential home in the Gaza Strip together with other senior militants.”
The Foreign Ministry report states the exception in law. A warning is not required, it says, “where the element of surprise is necessary for the success of a military operation (e.g., where a target is a militant who would escape if warned).” In the residential-home case, “The IDF reasonably expected that providing a specific warning prior to the attack would frustrate the strike’s objective.” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs restated the same exception for the current war in November 2023: where “the strike is aimed at a militant who may exploit the warning to escape,” there is “no legal requirement” to warn.
| What the strike is aimed at | Warning, in Israel’s own statements | Example given |
|---|---|---|
| The building, as a weapons store or command site | Required as a condition, with roof knocking where warnings went unheeded | The 8 July 2014 target card |
| A person inside the building | Not given, because it “would frustrate the strike’s objective” | A commander in a residential home, 2014 |
The two rows are Israel’s own account of two kinds of strike on a home. The first is the one it published in full. The second is the one the film describes, and for it the records examined here hold no card, no count and no statement of who else was in the house. The report does not say whether a family was present in its residential-home example; it names only “other senior militants.”
May a member of an armed group be attacked at home, in Israel’s stated view?
Israel’s Foreign Ministry states in its own 2015 report that members of Hamas’s military wing are lawful targets “at all times and in all places,” except when they are out of combat or protected by a special function. It adds that such members “are legitimate targets under customary international law, even when they are not in the act of preparing or conducting military activities.”
The IDF presentation’s definition of a person as a military target is silent on place. It lists “A Member of an enemy armed force, a member of an organize [sic] armed group, or a civilian directly participating in hostilities,” and puts a time limit only on the third. Under Israel’s stated view, a member at home is a member, and his home does not change his status. What the home changes is the harm expected to others, which is weighed under proportionality. The Institute’s report on who Israel counts as a civilian sets out the membership test in full.
The report acknowledges that the IDF struck members where they lived. Because such persons “often conducted their military activities from within presumptively civilian sites,” it states, “the IDF in many cases had little choice but to target them in these locations.” One 2014 case it gives is a strike on a commander in another militant’s house, which injured him and killed a second commander and the homeowner; “According to media reports, four civilians were also killed as a result of the strike.” The report presents the strike as lawful and attributes the four deaths to media reports.
The IDF Military Advocate General’s Corps states the bar for examining such deaths. In armed conflict, it states in its own account, “death or injury to a civilian or harm to civilian objects, while tragic and regrettable, in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct.” A family’s death in a strike on a member at home is therefore not, on that standard, by itself a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct.
How does the IDF’s strike chart treat warnings and evacuation?
The IDF’s strike chart, in its own presentation, asks 1 question about evacuation, “Area Evacuated?”, with a Yes or a No, and treats warning as “Warning Considerations” rather than as a gate. No branch is drawn from either answer, and every arrow runs on to “Permission to Strike.”
The wording leaves room for the exception Israel states. A warning is required “unless circumstances do not permit,” in the treaty’s words, and the chart leaves room for the circumstance the 2015 report describes, a target who would escape if warned. The chart does not say which targets on it received a warning.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry states two limits on what a warning can do, in its own 2015 report. “After providing a warning, the IDF did not assume that a relevant site or area had been evacuated,” and “the provision of a warning never, on its own, affected a proportionality assessment.” Civilians who stayed despite warnings, it states, were not treated “as voluntary human shields and thus legitimate targets for attack,” nor discounted “for purposes of its proportionality analyses.”
Roof knocking is the report’s last step. “In certain instances where warnings were unheeded or unfeasible,” the Foreign Ministry report states, the IDF “fired a low-explosive projectile at the target’s roof,” to give “civilians in or near the target a last opportunity to seek safety.” The report calls this “a progressive precaution that went beyond the requirements of international law.” It is described for strikes on buildings, and the records examined here describe no roof knock before a strike aimed at a person.
How many homes did the IDF warn before striking?
The IDF issued specific warnings before “more than a thousand attacks against individual targets” in the 2014 war, the Foreign Ministry report states in Israel’s own account, typically “through telephone calls to civilians inside or near buildings that were military objectives.” The same report counts “over 6,000 aerial strikes” in that war.
The two figures are floors and they count different things: warned attacks on individual targets, and all aerial strikes. The report does not say how many strikes hit homes, how many homes were warned, or how many were struck with no warning because a person inside was the target. Dividing one figure by the other would produce a share the report does not publish.
For the current war, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs counted “over 45,000 individual phone-calls urging people to temporarily leave areas of hostilities and individual targets” by 8 December 2023, alongside mass text messages, recorded calls and leaflets. The Foreign Ministry legal paper of November 2023 states the individual call in narrower terms: the IDF “in some cases made individual phone-calls to occupants of targets, warning them of impending attacks.” Both are the Ministry’s own counts and descriptions, and neither separates calls to homes from calls about areas.
The rules behind these counts are dated. The target card, the residential-home exception and the thousand warnings all describe 2014. The IDF confirmed in December 2024, as The Times of Israel reported, that its rules of engagement changed when the current war broke out, and it did not publish them. Whether the balance the 2015 report describes, warning weighed against surprise, moved with the rules is not recorded in any document examined here.
What can aerial footage show about people inside a building?
The 18 clips of IDF targeting footage provided to the Hanover Institute, the IDF’s own record, show people outside targets: on routes, in yards, beside a building. In one, dated 8 August 2024, the strike on a building is aborted twice, first for “A certain cyclist,” then for “two kids in the south.” No clip shows the inside of a building.
- A certain cyclist is arriving in a proximity to the building
- Currently not clear
- Copy that, aborted. Update me when he leaves
- He left, but two more people just arrived
- Currently not clear, there are two kids in the south
- Copy that, we are aborting
What the camera cannot see, intelligence has to supply. The 2014 target card’s “Presence at target” line comes from its intelligence panel, not from the footage, and the IDF presentation states that the IDF uses “visual and intelligence means to ensure that the area is clear of civilians” wherever feasible. For a family indoors, the answer to the chart’s question “Civilians in Target?” is an intelligence judgment made before the strike.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry records how that judgment can fail, in its own 2015 report. In a strike on a residential building in Khan Yunis on 8 July 2014, residents were warned and left, but people were “identified as approaching or returning to the premises after the bomb had been dropped,” and “eight civilians lost their lives.” The report calls it “this exceptional incident.”
The footage also shows the kind of estimate the last seconds require. On 17 May 2024 the report is “There is a person walking south, on the eastern route,” and “He will probably pass close to the target during execution [of the attack], about fifty meters,” before “Copy that, aborted.”
- There is a person walking south, on the eastern route
- He will probably pass close to the target during execution [of the attack], about fifty meters
- Copy that, aborted
The clips show an estimate of who might be near a target at the moment of impact. They cannot show what was known about who was inside, which is the knowledge the film says was present when strikes on homes were approved.
Methodology and limitations
This report sets the published account of the documentary NAZA against the IDF’s own records: the target card on the fifteenth slide of an IDF presentation provided to the Institute, the strike chart on its eighteenth, 18 clips of IDF footage, and the Israeli government’s published statements, principally the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ May 2015 report on the 2014 Gaza war, which prints the same target card whole. The film’s claims come from The Guardian, which produced it; the film was not viewed.
The 2015 report was read in full as published on gov.il, and its passages are quoted by paragraph. Where the report names people, including the commander whose house the card concerns and the family in the Khan Yunis case, this report does not. The clips appear exactly as received, with their checksums, and the Institute has not verified when or where they were recorded.
Every record here is a party’s own account. The 2015 report describes the rules of 2014, which the IDF has confirmed changed in the current war, and it prints one target card out of an unstated total. None of the records supports a count of homes struck, of homes struck without warning, or of families inside them.
Conclusion
The one target card Israel has published answers the question in the title for a single house in 2014. Does the IDF bomb homes knowing families are inside? On that card, yes: it lists the commander’s family among those present, and it responds with a condition that they be warned out before one bomb was dropped on the weapons store. The same report states the other rule plainly. When the target was a person rather than the building, the attack was made without warning, because a warning would have let him escape, and its example is a man in a residential home.
The records therefore describe two kinds of strike on a home and document only one. For the warned kind there is a card, a legal condition, a roof knock and a statement that no one was harmed. For the unwarned kind there is a parenthesis, one example and a stated view that a member of an armed wing may be attacked in all places. The film’s account falls in the second row of that table.
Israel’s own report describes the target card as part of the process for pre-planned attacks. For a strike on a person at home, what would its line for “Presence at target” record?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is roof knocking?
Israel’s own 2015 report describes it as firing “a low-explosive projectile at the target’s roof” to give “civilians in or near the target a last opportunity to seek safety before an attack.” The report calls it a precaution beyond the requirements of international law and describes it for strikes on buildings.
Does international law require the IDF to warn before striking a home?
Article 57(2)(c) of Additional Protocol I requires “effective advance warning” of attacks that may affect civilians, “unless circumstances do not permit.” Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs states that a strike aimed at “a militant who may exploit the warning to escape” is such a circumstance.
Why would the IDF strike at night?
The 2014 target card lists a nighttime strike among its conditions, and the 2015 report says the commander added it to the legal advisers’ condition of a warning. The report does not state the reason for the choice of hour.
Is the family on the target card named?
Israel’s 2015 report names the commander whose house the card concerns, and the card refers to “his family” without names. This report names none of them.
Did anyone die in the strike on the house in the target card?
Israel’s own 2015 report states that “the IDF is unaware of any claim of fatality or harm as a result of the attack.” That is the IDF’s account, and the records examined here contain no other.
How does the IDF know who is inside a building before a strike?
The target card’s list of who was present comes from its intelligence panel, and the IDF presentation says it uses “visual and intelligence means” to check that an area is clear of civilians. Aerial footage shows people outside a building; the 18 clips examined here show none inside.
Has Israel published target cards from the current war?
None is among the records examined here. The one card in the IDF presentation is the card Israel published in May 2015 for a strike on 8 July 2014.
Sources
- Israel Defense Forces, 2026. The IDF Spokesperson’s Response Following the Publication of the Movie “NAZA.” 11 September 2026. https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/israel-hamas-war-gaza/articles-israel-hamas-war-gaza/distributions-swords-of-iron-war-gaza/the-idf-spokesperson-s-response-following-the-publication-of-the-movie-naza/. Official statement, a party’s own.
- Israel Defense Forces, 2024 to 2026. Targeting footage of strikes diverted or called off, 18 clips. Provided to the Hanover Institute, 17 September 2026, and published as received. Official record, a party’s own footage.
- Israel Defense Forces, undated. Addressing Challenges Through LOAC | IHL, targeting process presentation, 18 slides. Provided to the Hanover Institute. /hanover/media/naza/idf-targeting-process-presentation.pdf. Official record, a party’s own presentation.
- Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2015. The 2014 Gaza Conflict: Factual and Legal Aspects, Chapter VI: IDF Conduct of Operations During the 2014 Gaza Conflict. Dated May 2015, released 14 June 2015. https://www.gov.il/en/pages/idf-conduct-of-operations-during-the-2014-gaza-conflict. Official record, a party’s own account.
- Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2023. Hamas-Israel Conflict 2023: Frequently Asked Questions. Updated to 8 December 2023. https://www.gov.il/en/pages/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023. Official record, a party’s own position.
- Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2023. Hamas-Israel Conflict 2023: Key Legal Aspects. Updated to 2 November 2023. https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023/en/English_Documents_Hamas-Israel%20Conflict%202023%20-%20Some%20Factual%20and%20Legal%20Aspects%20-%20Israel%20Ministry%20of%20Foreign%20Affairs%20(2%20NOV%202023).pdf. Official record, a party’s own position.
- Military Advocate General’s Corps, Israel Defense Forces, 2024. Addressing Alleged Misconduct in the Context of the War in Gaza. Published 24 February 2024, updated 3 August 2024. https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/military-advocate-generals-corps/addressing-alleged-misconduct-in-the-context-of-the-war-in-gaza-published-february-24-2024/. Official record, a party’s own account.
- Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977. Article 57. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/article-57. Treaty text.
- The Guardian, 2026. Secret systems used by Israel in mass killings of Gaza civilians revealed in new film. 10 September 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/10/secret-systems-used-by-israel-in-mass-killings-of-gaza-civilians-revealed-in-new-film. International press, the film’s producer.
- The Guardian, 2026. ‘They know the house they are bombing is full of children’: NAZA’s directors on their devastating film about Israeli intelligence. 11 September 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/11/naza-directors-film-israeli-intelligence-rachel-szor-yuval-abraham-. International press, the film’s producer.
- The Times of Israel, 2024. IDF loosened rules of engagement after Oct. 7, allowing more civilian deaths, NY Times. 26 December 2024. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-loosened-rules-of-engagement-after-oct-7-allowing-more-civilian-deaths-ny-times/. Israeli press, carrying the IDF’s response.