The Number before the Strike

I. A Word for a Number

In our essay “Who Opens the Box” we wrote that the line does not run between human and machine, but between defending against a projectile and selecting a human being. A film shown in Venice in September deals with the space between these two poles: a war in which, formally, a human decides every time, but the machine proposes the targets and a number has been fixed in advance.

“NAZA” is an abbreviation used by the Israeli army. It stands for nezek agavi, collateral damage. It refers to the number of civilians whose death in an air strike is considered acceptable. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who became known for “No Other Land”, interviewed 24 officers and soldiers from the army and intelligence services for the film, anonymously and on rooftops in Tel Aviv. The film was produced by the Guardian. In Venice it was the only documentary in competition and received the Special Jury Prize.

The interviewees describe how every potential target in the Gaza Strip receives a NAZA number: the number of uninvolved people whose death is accepted for that one target. After 7 October 2023, they say, these thresholds were raised sharply. In one case up to 500 were approved for a single person.

The film builds on investigations Abraham published in 2024 for the magazines +972 and Local Call. They concerned a system called “Lavender” which, according to the sources, marked up to 37,000 people as suspected fighters. For low-ranking members of Hamas, 15 to 20 civilian deaths were accepted; for senior commanders, in individual cases more than 100. The review of a proposal often took only about 20 seconds, and the sources themselves estimated the system’s error rate at around ten percent.

II. What the Army Says

The Israeli army rejects the central claims of the film, and its response deserves to be set out in full.

The army says it has “never planned an attack in which 500 civilians were expected to be killed”. Its binding guidelines distinguish “explicitly, categorically and unambiguously between terrorists and uninvolved civilians”. Artificial intelligence has “never selected targets on its own”; the identification of a target is carried out exclusively by trained intelligence officers. Lavender is not an attack list but a database that cross-references information from various sources. There have never been automatic approvals. Every strike is reviewed by commanders and legal advisers who can change or reject it.

Above all, the army says, estimating the expected civilian casualties is not a licence to kill but a duty imposed by international law. It is carried out so that a commander can change the attack plan or call off the strike altogether. In addition there are warnings to the population, the choice of smaller munitions and humanitarian aid. And the film, it says, conceals that Hamas deliberately entrenches itself in residential buildings, schools and hospitals and thereby itself puts civilians at risk.

A commentator in the Jerusalem Post has sharpened the argument: an army bent on annihilation would need no procedures for calculating civilian casualties. That they are counted and weighed shows that they are meant to be limited. And the expert in the motto says that whoever works with such systems wants to reduce collateral damage, and that in the end a human being always decides.

III. The Number Is Not an Israeli Invention

Whoever reads the film only as an indictment of Israel misses the most important point. Since the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1977, international law has required that the expected civilian casualties of an attack must not be “excessive” in relation to the anticipated military advantage. Every army that takes this seriously has to translate this weighing into its procedures somehow.

The US armed forces have done so for decades with a procedure and a term of their own, the non-combatant casualty cut-off value. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, strikes in which more than about 30 civilian deaths were expected had to be approved by the Secretary of Defense himself. For drone strikes outside the actual war zones, by contrast, a guideline from 2013 required near certainty that no civilians would be hit.

So the question is not whether there is a number. It is: how high is it, who sets it, how much time is there for review, and what does the number do to the person who applies it?

IV. What the Number Does to the Person

International law demands a judgement. “Excessive” is not a measured value but a weighing that must be made anew in each individual case: this target, this house, these people in it. A threshold turns this judgement into a check. The question is then no longer whether this strike costs too many lives, but whether the estimated number lies below the line.

One knows this from entirely different fields. A bank clerk who turns down a loan because the customer’s score lies below a limit has not decided. He has read off a value. Asked why, he points to the system. Whoever set up the system does not know the customer. The decision has been made, but nobody made it.

Hannah Arendt once called bureaucracy the “rule of Nobody”: an order in which no one can be held responsible any more, because everyone only did their part. In a war with target proposals and thresholds it looks like this: the machine proposes, the table permits, the officer signs off, the pilot flies. Each can say he kept to the rules. The burden that international law meant to place on a human being is spread until no one carries it any more.

This holds even when the number is low. But it weighs more heavily when it is high and when the time for review is short. Whether both were the case in Gaza is precisely the dispute between the film and the army.

V. Twenty Seconds

In Geneva there has been a dispute for years over the formula of “meaningful human control”. This case shows why the word “meaningful” is the real core. That a human stands in the process says nothing yet. A human who has twenty seconds to check a proposal that a machine has computed from thousands of data points controls nothing. He confirms. The expert in the motto raised this himself: the question is whether the human evaluates the information independently or serves merely as a “rubber stamp”.

The army disputes the twenty seconds. But even whoever believes it cannot get around a shift. Finding targets used to be the bottleneck of an air war. Reconnaissance had to observe for weeks before a target was established. Systems that propose targets in large numbers remove this bottleneck. The new bottleneck is the human who reviews, and on him now rests the pressure to keep pace. This is exactly what the open letter of 2017 warned against: wars “at timescales faster than humans can comprehend”.

VI. The Dispute over the Film

The reaction in Israel came for the most part before anyone had seen the film. The culture minister accused the directors of treason. The chief of the general staff announced that the army would take action against the film, including legal action. The prime minister held out the prospect of a law punishing defamation of soldiers with higher penalties and the revocation of citizenship. Demonstrators gathered outside Rachel Szor’s parents’ home and demanded that it be demolished. The Committee to Protect Journalists and ten other organisations called for the two directors to be protected.

That an army rejects the accusations of a film is its good right. That a state responds by threatening to revoke citizenship is something else. It is also remarkable who is speaking here. The directors are Israeli journalists; the sources are Israeli soldiers. That there are still people in this country who do not simply sign off on what they have done but talk about it is no sign of treason. It is the remnant of judgement this essay is about.

Whether the statements of the sources are correct in every detail, or those of the army, cannot be decided from outside. Nor do we decide it here, any more than the question whether a genocide is being committed in Gaza. That is before the International Court of Justice. What we can establish is what is missing: an independent body that is allowed to look. It is the same gap we described for AI in general in “Who Is Allowed to Look”.

VII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: the film relies on anonymous sources that no one can verify, and its makers have a clear political stance. That is true, and it is a serious objection to every single number in the film. But our argument does not depend on the number 500. It depends on what a threshold makes of a weighing, and that holds for every army that works this way.

The second objection: without numbers the decisions would be more arbitrary, not more humane. A threshold is a limit, not a licence, and an AI that knows better who is inside a building can save lives. That too is true. A limit can protect lives. But it becomes a licence when it is set high and ticked off quickly. What it is in the individual case depends on its height and on the time for review, and both are disputed.

The third objection: responsibility for the civilian casualties lies with Hamas, which hides its fighters among civilians. International law sees this differently, and explicitly so. Whoever misuses civilians as human shields commits a war crime himself. But that does not release the attacking side from its own duty to spare civilians. The Additional Protocol of 1977 says so in a paragraph of its own.

The essay would be refuted if an independent investigation showed that the thresholds were as low and the reviews as thorough as the army describes, and that the officers actually weighed every single strike rather than merely signing it off.

VIII. The Number

A number has a force of its own. It makes comparable what is incomparable, and it relieves the one who applies it of a burden. An officer who has to weigh before every strike whether it is worth these people carries this burden. Whoever only checks whether a value lies below a line no longer carries it. That is the purpose of the number, and it is its danger.

If the death of uninvolved people already has a number before the strike: who is then responsible for it? The one who sets the number, the one who reads it off, or no one?