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Hostages Like Me Were Also ‘NAZA’—Collateral Damage The Wall Street Journal If an Israeli bomb killed me, Hamas would win twice: I’d be dead, Israel would be responsible. By Omer Shem Tov I know what it is like to be collateral damage. For 505 days, that’s what I was. The anti-Israel documentary “NAZA”—the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage”—won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival this month. The film hasn’t been released in Israel, and I haven’t seen it. “NAZA,” which is based on interviews with anonymous Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, portrays a war in which Palestinian civilians were killed needlessly, even deliberately. What brought this war to Gaza—Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre and hostage-taking—is largely outside the frame. Hamas kidnapped me from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 and held me in Gaza for 505 days, much of that time in apartments in active combat zones. There was much to fear in captivity. Hunger. My captors. Never seeing my family again. But I also feared the Israeli air force. The Israeli pilots overhead had no idea where I was. Sometimes when my captors expected an Israeli attack was coming, they fled and left me behind. If an Israeli bomb killed me, Hamas would win twice: I would be dead, and Israel would be responsible. One of my captors told me his mother had received a phone call warning her to leave her home because an Israeli strike might put her in danger. The call came from the Israel Defense Forces. Hamas knew where I was and left me to die. Israel didn’t know my location, but it knew where my captor’s mother was and called to make sure she wasn’t killed accidentally. There I was—kidnapped, starved and tortured by her son—while my army was trying to keep his mother alive. Israel desperately wanted me home. But not at any price. There were Palestinian civilians between Israel and me. So Israel dropped leaflets, sent messages, made phone calls and ordered evacuations. It tried to minimize NAZA, or collateral damage. I also saw what death meant to the other side. One day, my captors celebrated after Hamas fighters killed Israeli soldiers. The next day, Israel bombed the area where I was being held. The explosions came about 10 seconds apart. I was terrified. The terrorist beside me was delighted. To him, every explosion was proof of success: Look what we made Israel do. Look how much we hurt them. I understood something then. For Hamas, destruction itself could be victory. As long as there was death on either side, Hamas could win. After I came home, I learned that the numbers reflected some of what I had seen. The United Nations has reported that when explosive weapons are used in populated areas, around 90% of those killed and injured are civilians. Although the exact ratio in Gaza is disputed, Israeli military officials and U.S. analysts have estimated between 1.5 and 2 Palestinian civilians killed for every combatant—low for warfare this intense in an urban battlefield. That didn’t happen by accident. Warnings, evacuations and decisions not to strike saved Palestinian lives. Israel also paid a price for these careful decisions. They gave Hamas time. They exposed Israeli soldiers to greater danger. And they left hostages like me waiting longer. A dead Palestinian child isn’t made less dead by a statistic. But neither should we ignore what Israel risked to reduce that number. If Israel had cared less about NAZA, perhaps I would have come home sooner. Fewer Israeli soldiers might have died. Fewer hostages might have died. But more Palestinians would have. That is why “NAZA” troubles me. In Venice, the film received a standing ovation that lasted more than 24 minutes. As a former hostage, those minutes felt like a shower of knives. Not because the film shows Palestinian suffering, which is real and deserves to be seen. What hurts is that the film, as it has been reported, doesn’t seem to see me. It sees the suffering in Gaza, but not what brought the war there: Hamas’s planning, the murder of families on Oct. 7, the people dragged from their homes and a music festival. None of that seems to create much of a moral dilemma for the film’s writers. In that story, perhaps I am NAZA too. Collateral damage. A Jewish hostage who could have been left to rot in a Hamas tunnel, or murdered alongside my friends at Nova, because fighting to free me, and to protect Israelis from the people who did this, is itself treated as morally suspect. Military power, weapons and technology matter. But a society’s ability to defend itself must depend on something simpler: the moral clarity to know that it has the right to do so. There must never be another Oct. 7. We have the right to ensure there isn’t. And we shouldn’t be ashamed of it. Mr. Shem Tov is author of “Meeting Myself in Hell,” a memoir of his time in captivity.