Before you start watching NAZA, the quietly devastating film in which anonymised Israeli soldiers explain the process by which they picked who lived and who died in Gaza, Yuval Abraham wants you to know why he chose that title.
It’s not because it sounds almost like Gaza, the shattered enclave where decisions made by these officers and their peers in the Israel Defense Forces led to the killing, at last count, of more than 74,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials.
Nor is it because it sounds almost like Nazi, with the shrouded, perhaps antisemitic, suggestion that a nation born out of a genocide is now perpetrating another — an accusation that Israel furiously denies.
Instead, Abraham points out, NAZA is the military acronym for nezek agavi, “collateral damage” in Hebrew. And for him and co-director Rachel Szor, who shot most of this spare documentary, that was “the key that held the layer of using language as a form of dehumanisation”.
“It was the key to see how people who see themselves as part of Israel’s centre-left, liberal elite could participate in such mass killing,” he says.
That’s how controversial this film, which was co-produced by The Guardian and JW Films, is proving to be: even before most ordinary Israelis have seen more than its trailer, its matter-of-fact title is being scrutinised for signs of bias and slander.
Alongside a media furore, Szor’s family home has been blockaded by protesters, and graffiti labelling her and Abraham as traitors has appeared on walls in Israeli cities. It will have come as little surprise to the film-makers, who shared an Oscar last year for 2024’s No Other Land, about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, with two Palestinian colleagues.
Abraham, in particular, has been a target of rightwing Israeli vitriol since that film, and his subsequent, critical reporting in +972 magazine about the IDF’s actions in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Never one to shy away from hyperbole, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court for some of the actions described by the intelligence officers in NAZA, likened it to the equivalent of “dozens of ballistic missiles” and threatened to revoke the film-makers’ Israeli citizenship. (Netanyahu, who is battling for his political future in elections scheduled for October 27, has rejected the ICC’s allegations, dismissing them as an antisemitic blood libel.)
“This is how you talk about someone you want to kill — people who shoot ballistic missiles at Israel are people that the Israeli government assassinates and kills,” says Abraham, who believes that if he were to return to Israel, he could be assaulted, or worse.
Whom the Israeli government chooses to kill, how it chooses to kill them and how it decides how many innocent — Israel uses the word “uninvolved” — civilians will perish alongside them is the subject that NAZA seeks to unveil.
The answers come from 24 veterans of Israel’s most devastating war in terms of Palestinian casualties, their faces hidden in shadow. They reveal the clinical, detached efficiency with which they tracked down men with connections — sometimes real, sometimes tenuous, sometimes non-existent — to Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that sparked this war on October 7 2023, when it crossed the border into Israel and killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostage.
The anger and trauma of that slaughter, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, has cast a shadow over the decisions that Israeli leaders made in its aftermath — from a siege that starved Gazans to a bombing campaign that destroyed much of the enclave and the razing of entire cities to dust.
“We said, ‘we need to erase Gaza’,” says one soldier in NAZA. “We erased history, and then we burned what was left,” says another. “Gaza is full of bodies,” says a third, who watched through a drone as dogs ate the flesh off rotting Palestinian corpses.
But incendiary statements like these are not the point of NAZA. Shot on Tel Aviv rooftops at night and interspersed with telling shots of the thriving city’s nocturnal lives, the film seeks to dissect the processes behind how much of the Israeli intelligence corps became, as one soldier says, “a factory” for producing targets.
“Efficiently,” he adds. Early on in the war — the first day itself, The New York Times has reported — the Israeli military loosened its rules on collateral damage: mid-ranking Israeli officers were given the authority to risk the lives of as many as 20 Palestinian civilians, even if the intended target was a low-ranking Hamas fighter.
But for higher-ranking Hamas leaders, Israeli military lawyers were able to sign off on strikes that could — and often did — kill 100 innocents, it is claimed in the film. In one case, a soldier tells Abraham, the lawyers approved risking the lives of up to 500 Palestinian civilians — or 500 NAZA, in military jargon — to kill a single member of Hamas. (One of the officers makes clear how the phrase reduced Palestinian humanity to a calculation — always 20 NAZA or 100 NAZA, never 20 people.)
The Israeli military released a 3,900-word rebuttal to NAZA last week, after the film got a 24-minute standing ovation and was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
The response expands on the IDF’s stance throughout the war and asserts in general that the military values civilian life, follows international law in assessing and mitigating harm and, specifically, that it never gave a blanket approval for 20 NAZA, or ever approved a strike endangering 500 civilians.
“The tragic consequences of war do not justify distorting the facts,” it said. “The IDF has acted and continues to act humanely, even if the film-makers have done everything they can to conceal that fact.”
The IDF also criticised the use of anonymous sources. The Guardian countered by saying that source protection was common practice in journalism and that the team behind the film had “interviewed more than 100 sources familiar with IDF systems used in the war in Gaza, including senior-ranking commanders directly involved in the authorisation of strikes”.
While shocking, and arguably immoral, risking the lives of innocents is sometimes lawful under the rules that govern armed conflict, under arcane conditions first defined by the Geneva Conventions (distinction, proportionality, necessity and so on) and the body of treaties and jurisprudence collectively referred to as international humanitarian law.
“We already knew within the first weeks that the level of civilian harm per incident was outpacing anything we’d seen in any war that we documented before this,” says Emily Tripp, executive director at Airwars, a UK-based rights group that tracks the impact conflicts around the world have on civilians.
In the first month alone, more children were killed in Gaza than in any year, in any recent war, including the Russian bombardment of Aleppo or the US battles to reclaim Mosul or Raqqa, says Tripp. “Multiple times we were getting these cases with close to or more than a hundred civilians killed, and those cases themselves barely made headlines,” she adds.
The rooftop interviews are sometimes interrupted by the reality of the war itself — air raid sirens, television screens inside homes showing the evening news. At other times, Szor and Abraham deftly intersperse the normality of Tel Aviv life as contrast to the moral weight of the soldiers’ confessions.
While they speak about the destruction of Gaza, just an hour’s drive south, the film shows construction cranes adding to Tel Aviv’s sparkling skyline; when they talk about the shooting of hungry Palestinians running towards food, it shows crowded restaurants and Israelis in their kitchens.
“The most consequential feature of it is that it shows how Israelis from Israel’s liberal, law-abiding, somewhat leftwing camp who oppose Netanyahu and many of his government’s policies were so easily conscripted into waging a war that brought immense destruction,” says Sophia Goodfriend, a University of Cambridge anthropologist who writes about automated warfare and was this week barred from entering Israel.
Among the most chilling moments is the almost clinical dissection of the sophisticated machinery that powers Israeli targeting — the expanded use of artificial intelligence to hunt for Hamas operatives and the pervasive surveillance of Palestinians. This included a system nicknamed “Where’s Daddy?” which, according to the soldiers in the film, often hacked, en masse, the phones of children to ascertain when their fathers, suspected of ties to Hamas, came home.
The subsequent bombing of the homes, often killing entire families, multiplied the civilian death toll but made the task of eliminating suspected Hamas members easier for the Israeli military, several of the soldiers say. “You hack her phone, and then you kill her,” says one soldier of a 12-year-old. He describes scrolling through the selfies on her phone, then listening in after the air strike as she burned to death.
“A lot of the reaction from audiences focuses on the dystopian array of technology that has been developed and deployed in Gaza because it is intrusive and terrifying to think about how artificial intelligence can be used to churn out an unending number of military targets and track them down in their homes,” says Goodfriend.
For non-Israelis watching the film, there is the sense of eavesdropping on a confession — Israelis discussing in Hebrew the complexities and nuances of modern warfare with each other. Abraham says he and Szor made the conscious choice to focus on the system, rather than individuals, to force a reckoning within Israel.
“Many people in the society have lived in a total denial or justification of crimes in Gaza,” he says. “And there is something about having to face that — not only through a film that is made by Israeli directors, but through a film where Israeli soldiers and officers themselves thought it was important to speak out.”
Sometimes, the reckoning happens on the screen itself. In one interaction, Abraham poses a question to one soldier: if killing 20 civilians for one member of Hamas is justified, and Hamas has thousands of members, doesn’t that logic imply every Palestinian in Gaza could eventually be killed?
“I’m not really sure what to do with this realisation,” the soldier says.
Another does. “I asked myself how Germans could live with themselves. Now I understand,” he says, referring to a childhood school trip to the concentration camps in Poland.
“I still see the Nazis as evil,” he says. “But what does that make me?”
‘NAZA’ is in US cinemas now and in UK cinemas from October 16, naza.movie
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