As soon as Hamas succeeded with its October 7 invasion and it became clear how hard Israel would need to come down on the Gaza terror group to restore its security, some significant public relations hit to the Jewish state was inevitable.
However, Israel and the IDF then conducted themselves in such ways that the public relations hit developed into a diplomatic tsunami which has harmed Israel's long-term national security and economic strength.
That is history and cannot be changed.
When the NAZA film came out in mid-September, a week after the EU sanctioned Israel's West Bank, a new chapter started.
Israel was going to take another major hit. But it also had a new opportunity and the world's full attention to set the record straight across the globe over the alleged war crimes and genocide debate.
Unlike earlier in the war, when it was overwhelmed fighting on seven fronts, had tremendous uncertainty about the future, and insufficient time had passed to investigate many incidents – all of these factors, which before delayed Israel providing a detailed response to war crimes allegations, were now more in Israel's favor.
Israel has no major active conflict on any fronts. It has had a ceasefire with Hamas since October 2025. Any incidents since then have been a relatively small number of easily trackable, targeted airstrikes.
If Israel swung and missed big, or did not even bother to swing on the war crimes allegations a year ago and two years ago, now was the chance for Israel to take a more detailed and comprehensive stand. Such a stand would include debunking many false claims, but also admitting in detail to the various errors, which would, in turn, strengthen the defense against the mostly false claims.
Israel is failing to do this. In that failure, Israel and the IDF are bringing about another unnecessary major loss on the public relations front, which will reverberate on the national security, economic, and legal fronts in a much graver way than earlier, because Israel is starting from a much lower point in its international standing.
Will Israel wait until two houses of the US Congress, and possibly in two more years, the occupant of the White House, decide to stop selling Jerusalem the crucial F-35 and other irreplaceable aircraft to realize that holding its cards close to its chest is no longer an option?
What has been held back for nearly three years and is still unconscionably being held back after the NAZA film?
Let's take Israel's response to the NAZA film.
The film is visually powerful, but it has many gaping holes in its specifics.
For example, the film claims that Israel used a 100-to-1 ratio of civilians to combatants when targeting senior Hamas figures and a 201-to-1 ratio when targeting lower Hamas members.
Israel rightly challenged these generalities and asked for specific examples.
Sad, misguided, and self-defeating responses
Last week, the BBC provided those examples with meticulous comprehensiveness.
For several days, The Jerusalem Post spoke to several sources at multiple levels and in different IDF divisions, begging to get specific responses to the examples presented by the BBC.
The sad, misguided, and self-defeating responses of IDF sources were as follows:
1) There is no point. No one believes us anyway, and the whole world is against us anyway.
2) They have given us too many examples to respond to, and we don't have the resources to respond.
3) If we give out the information, it will endanger information security considerations, help the enemy, or be used against us in international judicial war crimes proceedings, or both.
Anyone who says point number one should not handle public relations, as it signals they don't understand the nuances of different sectors of the public in the US, Europe, and elsewhere.
There are absolutely antisemites as well as long-standing "naïve idiots" who are anti-Israel who will never be convinced of Jerusalem's just or complex case.
But there are also tons of people across the West and in other regions of the world who stood with Israel before October 7, after October 7, and for the rest of 2023 and much of 2024, even as the IDF ground parts of Gaza into the sand while fighting Hamas.
For many longtime Israel supporters, the change only came in July 2025 when Israel admitted a major food insecurity crisis in Gaza, and the UN declared that famine had finally occurred.
Subsequently, it became clear that Israel's food surge narrowly avoided famine.
But the stain of the high likelihood of famine, which Israel was forced to admit to (even if it ultimately avoided it) led to a sea change and Israel's European allies finally recognized a Palestinian state, giving Israel nothing in exchange.
In addition, Israel's Western allies lost patience with years of the government, especially the police, failing to rein in Jewish lawlessness and even sometimes terror in the West Bank.
But most importantly, once the invasion of Gaza ended in October 2025, the world's patience in waiting for Israel's answer to war crimes charges was exhausted.
This was a process, and some of these once pro-Israel people might still be retrievable if Jerusalem and the IDF act fast enough with a transparency blitz to confront NAZA and answer the specific charges in the BBC article.
The case is under review
Regarding the IDF claim that the BBC asked for too many responses, the Post then asked the IDF to respond, at a minimum, to the four highly specific cases the BBC flagged.
The first case was from December 2023 when a mother, Nahida Anton, and her daughter, Samar Anton, were killed by sniper fire inside the grounds of the Holy Family church in Gaza, according to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
Nearly three years later, the IDF simply states the case is under review.
After three years, it is actually pretty simple: the IDF admits fault and is deciding whether to prosecute or merely discipline the soldiers involved; the IDF denies fault and explains why; or the IDF admits that its record-keeping was faulty and it is not sure who might have been involved and so cannot reach a conclusion. Some of these results could be embarrassing, but after three years, delaying the answer is far worse and makes it look like the NAZA story is true and the IDF's request for specifics a straw man.
In the second case, the IDF struck the Tabaeen school complex and nearby mosque in Gaza in August 2024. Gazan authorities and the BBC claim that at least 93 people were killed, including six women and 11 children. The IDF much earlier in the war responded that 31 Hamas terrorists were killed and that the civilian death estimates were exaggerated.
After over two years, how many civilians does the IDF say were actually killed, if not 62 (93 minus 31)? Once again, the IDF can own up to having made a mistake and killed too many civilians, can defend its claim and say how many civilians actually died, or can share why it thought the civilian death reports were exaggerated, while explaining where some permanent uncertainty will remain.
Possibly embarrassing, but much better than the current silence.
In the third case, just outside of Jenin in September 2024, the IDF reportedly killed 16-year-old Lujain Musleh during an Israeli operation. Lujain's father said she was shot in the head as she looked out of the window at her house in Kafr Dan, after soldiers had surrounded a neighboring house. According to the BBC, the IDF said at the time that armed fighters had fired on the soldiers, who had "fired back at a suspect who observed" them, and that the details of the incident were under review.
How is this still open two years later? There are again three simple choices for the IDF to choose from about how to respond at this point.
The fourth case involves Lebanon. There, an IDF investigation identified by BBC Verify looked into an incident on November 10, 2024, in which an Israeli strike allegedly killed 23 people, including seven children, near the city of Byblos, Lebanon. According to the BBC, the IDF said at the time it had targeted a Hezbollah site, and that it was reviewing the incident.
To be a broken record: How is this still open two years later? There are again three simple choices for the IDF to choose from about how to respond at this point.
What is useful, and devastating, about the BBC article is that it provides both concrete data as an overview, collating all of the 300 or so times when the IDF said it was investigating an incident, with four specific incidents covering the Gaza, West Bank, and Lebanon fronts.
Unlike NAZA, the BBC is being specific. It is basing itself on IDF public data. And then it simply asks the IDF to provide its side of the story.
The IDF provided a bizarre, long-winded, tone-deaf response about the numerous factors it considers when and how to publicize decisions on such incidents.
Here is the bottom line: for nearly three years, until August 19, 2026, the IDF published almost zero public decisions.
On August 19, 2026, to its credit, it finally published five well-reasoned and detailed decisions.
But what about the other 295 decisions?
There are 10 or so other specific decisions which the Post has been requesting responses to for around two years.
The BBC credits the IDF with decisions, or partial decisions, in another 40 or so cases, even if the IDF did a poor job highlighting them and failed to make any major announcement.
To its credit, the IDF has said it is criminally investigating 150 cases and has carried out preliminary reviews of 3,000 cases. To its credit, the BBC acknowledges the IDF has said that it disciplined dozens of soldiers.
But if the IDF got far enough along to need to criminally probe 150 cases, why can it not release some more comprehensive interim findings of where these cases stand – at least after two or three years from when most incidents occurred?
The Post also asked the IDF to release ranks, violation categories, and punishment categories for the dozens of soldiers disciplined, without disclosing the specific soldiers' names or units.
Without doing so, how can any fair-minded Westerner judge what disciplining dozens of soldiers really means?
The BBC also interviewed former IDF international law department chief Col. (res.) Eran Shamir Borer, who encouraged the military to be more transparent.
In fact, in around a dozen conversations with top IDF legal officials over the course of the war, all of them have said the IDF should move faster and be more transparent in publicizing decisions, dating back all the way to summer 2024 when the military first started any public discussion of its probes.
We return to the third reason for not disclosing information: information security and the risk that facts could be abused in international proceedings.
The IDF has launched likely 20,000 or quite a bit more airstrikes on Gaza over the last three years. Hamas has huge data to understand when it will and will not attack regarding civilians.
On top of that, the IDF has killed over 25,000 Hamas terrorists despite the group's human shields strategy.
This is one of the most public wars in history, with the only missing piece being Israel's defensive narrative.
Do Israeli generals really think that anything they put into the public sphere is going to be all that new to Hamas or bring back to life the already killed 25,000 terrorists? The International Criminal Court has already issued arrest warrants in two rounds against Israelis, and it and the International Court of Justice are mainly considering being tougher on Israel in lieu of a comprehensive defense.
How much worse will providing a detailed defense make things?
Israel has lost the Palestinian statehood diplomatic battle, the reputational battle, much of the legal battle, and, recently, a sanctions battle, but still has a chance to hold onto its national security needs with the US.
Will Israel and the IDF wake up in time?