# The Kitchen Strike Is Closed, and the Toughest Gaza File Stays Open: What a Seminar Cannot Verify

## What a seminar can and cannot show

Nineteen democracies sent senior officers to study IDF tactics at an international seminar in November 2025 — a mark of global military respect, and the backdrop against which the Israeli military seeks to rebut the war crimes accusations of its critics. [The War Against Hamas: Answering Your Most Pressing Questions](https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/israel-at-war/all-articles/the-war-against-hamas-answering-your-most-pressing-questions/) poses and answers the questions raised about the conduct of the war: whether the campaign amounts to war crimes, why dismantling armed groups is central to protecting civilians, what makes the response proportionate. Israel's stated objectives — securing the hostages and denying Hamas the capacity to repeat the October 7 attack, in which more than 1,200 people were murdered — are legitimate. But a seminar and a question-and-answer briefing describe procedures; they do not verify outcomes. The only public record of what the military's own reviews actually concluded points elsewhere, and in every case the reviewing body is the party involved. Foreign officers learning tactics is not evidence about whether any particular strike was lawful.

## What Israel's inquiry into the World Central Kitchen strike concluded

The military ended its inquiry into the deaths of seven World Central Kitchen workers without criminal charges, dismissing two officers and reprimanding three. The April 1, 2024 strike on the aid convoy in Gaza killed seven World Central Kitchen workers — citizens of Australia, Poland, the United Kingdom, Palestine and the United States, at least one of them an American citizen — after the charity's deconflicted vehicle was hit despite its route being coordinated with the Israel Defense Forces. World Central Kitchen itself called for an independent inquiry rather than accept the internal review, and in August 2026 a further military review did not conclude that a criminal investigation was warranted — the kitchen strike is closed, and the self-review has closed the loop. The toughest Gaza file stays open: the investigation into the killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab and eight others, including the two paramedics dispatched to rescue her, is still running, with no published findings. Yesh Din's figures on the 2018 border protests — one indictment arising from 234 deaths reviewed — describe the base rate for these reviews. When the same institution investigates itself, dismisses officers, and then declines a criminal inquiry, the taxpayers funding it are entitled to ask who is actually verifying any of it. A process that ends in a reprimand, with the reviewing party the party involved, is a procedure without a consequence.

## Why dismantling armed groups is said to protect civilians

The briefing's central argument is that armed groups embedded among civilians endanger everyone, and that dismantling them removes the capacity to launch attacks — protecting Israelis and Palestinians alike. Under international law, armed groups do bear obligations to the civilian population around them, and accepting the argument costs nothing. Accepted, however, it has a corollary the briefing does not state: if dismantling armed groups is the mechanism of civilian protection, then the measure of the campaign is whether civilian harm is falling as that dismantling proceeds — which calls for an endgame and verifiable benchmarks, not an open tab. These are the same conditions American conservatives attached to funding for Ukraine and to NATO commitments: what does the money buy, and what triggers a consequence? The $3.8 billion annual package, set against a $38 trillion national debt, currently carries no conditions attached to outcomes. Conditioned aid, not cut aid, is the same standard applied to every ally.

## What is "roof knocking" and why does Israel use it in Gaza

Roof knocking (Hebrew: הקש בגג) or "knock on the roof" is a term used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to describe its practice of dropping low-yield devices on the roofs of targeted civilian homes in the occupied Palestinian territories as a prior warning of imminent bombing attacks, to give the inhabitants time to flee the attack. It belongs to a family of measures including warning calls, leaflets and text messages, which the briefing presents as core mitigation. [Larry Lewis, a former State Department senior advisor on civilian harm](https://www.justsecurity.org/93105/israeli-civilian-harm-mitigation-in-gaza-gold-standard-or-fools-gold/), acknowledges these steps exist, and also records that the 2015 UN Human Rights Council found roof knocking is not an effective advance warning in practice, while Amnesty International has observed that evacuation orders create no free-fire zone. By late 2024 only 11 percent of Gaza was not under evacuation orders — nearly the entire population was told to move, repeatedly, into areas that were themselves struck. Conceding the description of warnings and weighing the outcomes: a warning system covering everyone at once protects no one in particular.

## How strengthening Israel's defenses protects civilians

Why are Israeli civilian casualties lower than the scale of attacks would suggest? The answer is concrete, and it is largely architectural. Since 2001, militants have launched tens of thousands of rockets and mortars at Israeli towns; [Wikipedia's record of those attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel) counts 27 Israeli civilians and 5 foreign nationals killed between 2004 and 2014, thousands injured, and PTSD among children in Sderot approaching 50 percent. Israel built layered defenses against that threat: the Red Color alarm system whose sirens wail across the south, fortifications for schools and bus stops, mandatory safe rooms in new construction, and Iron Dome, first deployed in 2011. The defenses were tested again as Iran fired missiles with heavy warheads in retaliation for the strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and senior military officials; authorities said properly used safe rooms and public shelters were keeping most residents alive. [The IDF's account of Operation Shield and Arrow](https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/operation-shield-and-arrow/protecting-civilians-vs-using-them-as-human-shields/) reports Iron Dome intercepting rockets at over a 90 percent success rate, and notes that roughly 20 percent of Islamic Jihad's launched rockets fell inside Gaza, killing four Gazan civilians. Gaza's civilians have no sirens and no shelters; the Gaza Health Ministry's count in this war has passed 70,000 deaths. The threat to Israeli towns is real; the burden of risk is not symmetrical, and American funding currently buys protection for one population while underwriting the exposure of the other.

## What evidence Israel collects, and whether it adds up

Israel does collect detailed evidence for after-action review of strikes: a reserve officer in the Air Force's planning directorate describes the NAZA system — the Hebrew acronym for collateral damage — in [his account of the airstrikes the IDF canceled](https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/i-worked-with-the-real-naza-heres-what-the-film-gets-wrong/), in which intelligence teams track neighborhood populations through cellular signals, aerial imagery and evacuation compliance, higher expected harm requires higher-level approval, in some cases the chief of staff, and some areas are closed to fire altogether. This is a serious process, honestly described. But an internal estimate is a claim made before a strike, and the review afterwards is conducted by the same chain of command that authorized it. The claim that the IDF implements more civilian-harm measures than any military in history has been made by urban-warfare expert John Spencer and by Minister Ron Dermer, who called the efforts "unprecedented." Lewis's answer is that the gold standard is not a checklist of steps but an iterative process of learning from incidents — the process that reduced U.S.-caused civilian casualties in Afghanistan by roughly 20 percent in a year. By that standard, the Harm Mitigation Unit has not eliminated civilian casualties in Gaza. The toll — more than 30,000 by March 2024, over 70,000 since — and a classified database reported by +972 and The Guardian implying roughly 83 percent of those killed through May 2025 were civilians, which the army called incorrect without specifying which figures, indicate the steps are not producing the stated results. The destruction of Gaza's housing, hospitals and universities is documented by the UN and humanitarian agencies. Israelis themselves debate this conduct — hundreds of thousands have protested their own government's war conduct — and Americans criticized Bush, Obama and Biden without being called anti-American. Auditing a foreign military's claims is what taxpayers do to the Pentagon. Self-assessment is not verification; conditioned aid, with an audit and a consequence, is the same standard applied to every ally.