NAZA exposes what Israel wants hidden about the Gaza war

For three years, Israel has been drowning in an argument with itself—the intelligence collapse, the political abdication, the dissolution of the foundations the state had promised its citizens on October 7, 2023. That reckoning will eventually consume a generation of political and security leaders, Netanyahu foremost among them. Then came the second tremor. On September 10, the documentary NAZA premiered in the main competition at the Venice Film Festival—the only documentary in the running for the Golden Lion, the festival's top prize. Two days later, it won the Special Jury Prize. Between those dates, it received a standing ovation of nearly 25 minutes, a festival record, and not the reflexive applause of a room in evening dress. It was closer to a verdict.

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli journalists who won the Academy Award for No Other Land, directed the film. It was shot in secret over three years, on rooftops in Tel Aviv, while the extermination it documents was still underway (it still is). It is built out of 24 interviews with Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers. Some say plainly that they took part in war crimes and genocide. One describes mass killing on an industrial scale—in a war that has killed, wounded, or maimed more than 300,000 people in Gaza, a high proportion of them women and children, not counting those still under the rubble.

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The title is the indictment. Naza is the Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage—the number of civilians expected to die in a strike, calculated beforehand, entered as a figure, and signed off. Not a tragedy discovered afterward. A quantity approved in advance. The interviewees describe artificial intelligence and mass phone surveillance generating kill lists, crude point systems ranking human beings, and homes struck with full knowledge that families were inside. They describe neighbourhoods levelled where the army's own estimates put a quarter of residents still in their houses, civilians shot at a food distribution site, and the systematic burning of homes to produce a wasteland no one can return to. And they place the orders where they belong. Several served in a secret intelligence unit reporting directly to the prime minister's office; one says its purpose was to thwart peace. The filmmakers make it clear this is not a film about rogue soldiers or sporadic atrocities. It is a film about policy, about the orders themselves; about a system working exactly as designed. Israel's response has been to prosecute the messengers, at a volume audible on every continent.

Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir ordered a review of legal action against the directors and an investigation into the leaking of classified material, accusing the film of blood libel. The army said the damage abroad was severe, with particular concern about Unit 8200, whose alumni staff the technology economy and whose ties to foreign agencies are a national asset. The IOF categorically rejected the allegations, saying it cannot verify anonymous testimony. A former Likud MK went further, declaring the film a complete invention by Israel-haters from within. Netanyahu called it intolerable incitement arriving from within.

And the culture minister, Miki Zohar, a man whose relationship to culture has always been that of a bailiff to a library, announced he would move to strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship, calling the film vile and their work treasonous. Consider what is being said here: the state does not dispute that these systems exist; it disputes that anyone should be allowed to describe them. It has not answered a single allegation with evidence. It has answered with a leak investigation, a legal review, and a proposal to make two of its own citizens stateless. That is not the behavior of a government confident in its innocence, but rather of a government that knows what is in the film.

It is also the most effective publicity campaign the film could have asked for. Every ministerial threat extends its reach; every demand for punishment confirms, for audiences who had never heard of Unit 8200, that something in those 80 minutes is true enough to terrify a cabinet. More than 1,000 filmmakers have signed in defense of the directors. Israel is now the film's distributor. But the real damage is domestic. For two decades the official reflex was to disqualify the accuser—that the International Court of Justice was biased, the International Criminal Court political, the United Nations captured and prejudiced, the human rights organisations compromised. Palestinian testimony was, by definition, the enemy's—a claim requiring corroboration it would never be permitted to obtain. The reflex worked because the accusation always arrived from outside. NAZA has no outsiders. The witnesses wore the uniform. The directors carry the passport the culture minister now wants to cancel. An Israeli watching this film is not being lectured by a foreign court; he is being shown his own army, in his own language, by the people who aimed it.

Its existence is inseparable from a shift in the institutions that decide which stories get told. NAZA was produced by The Guardian, building on investigative work with +972 Magazine and Local Call. This is not one newspaper changing camps overnight. But Western journalism spent decades inside a consensus where Israel's security narrative was the default frame and Palestinian testimony the suspect claim, where Palestinian deaths became statistics and Palestinian suffering became scenery. A major British institution bankrolling the confessions of Israeli intelligence officers is evidence that arguments once dismissed as marginal now sit in the center of the room. The cost of speaking has not disappeared. People doing this work lose funding, distribution evaporates, and the charge of treason is the first instrument reached for. More of them speak anyway. Meanwhile, satellite imagery, leaked documents, and open-source investigation collide with the diplomatic vocabulary that governments spent years constructing. The camera does what diplomacy cannot: it makes the invisible visible and holds institutions to their own words.

Israel is treating NAZA as a security breach rather than a set of claims to be answered. As long as that remains the strategy, and they keep killing, straining the truth through a sieve, and punishing anyone who reveals it, the next tremor is only a matter of time.

Yousef SY Ramadan is the ambassador of Palestine to Bangladesh.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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