This Sept. 24, 2026 Op-Ed by CAMERA’s Leah Benoz appeared in The Jerusalem Post.
The rapturous reception for the documentary film NAZA, whose name comes from the Hebrew acronym applied to the collateral damage estimates carried out by all law-abiding militaries, has once again brought allegations of cruel and arbitrary slaughter of civilians to Israel’s door.
There is a noble assumption at the heart of conflict journalism: that unflinching reporting of the horrors of war protects civilians and holds military power to account.
But conflict has changed, the information battlefield has changed, and now the way civilian casualties are being reported is actually creating a strategic incentive to produce them.
This is a phenomenon called civilian casualty harvesting: the deliberate exploitation of civilian deaths and suffering as a military and political resource. It is related to human shielding, but it is not the same thing. It is a cynical and grotesque abuse of conflict reporting.
Human shielding describes the use of civilians to protect military infrastructure. International humanitarian law prohibits it. The International Committee of the Red Cross defines human shielding as using the presence or movement of civilians to render military objectives immune from attack or to shield or impede military operations.
Read the rest of CAMERA’s op-ed at The Jerusalem Post.