How has the Israeli military decided who lives and who dies in Gaza? Why has it slaughtered so many—now over 75,225 dead and at least 175,068 wounded—and counting?
The documentary film NAZA unflinchingly answers these question through a series of interviews with 24 IDF (Israel Defense Forces) intelligence officers and soldiers directly involved in compiling kill lists, choosing targets, and authorizing deadly airstrikes. Officers “who calculated how many innocent people were likely to be killed in each house,” as the Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who wrote and directed NAZA, put it. In other words, straight from the “horse’s mouth.”1
“This is a film about a system. It focuses on orders, policies, and patterns of operation, not deviations from them,” the filmmakers write. “The conclusion that we draw from the testimonies is clear: The mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza was not a ‘tragic byproduct’ of a war against Hamas, as it is commonly portrayed in Israel, but a premeditated, calculated, and intentional act.”
A Timely Provocation from Bob Avakian—November 10, 2023
The following is a companion to my statement that: After the Holocaust, the worst thing that has happened to Jewish people is the state of Israel.
Israel has done something truly incredible—Israel has managed to turn Jews into Nazis!
NAZA walks through the machinery of Israel’s systematic slaughter in Gaza: the mass surveillance, the hacked phones, the AI-enabled profiling, the rapid target selection, and the level of civilian casualties allowed, or perhaps better put, welcomed for each attack. At the heart of it: “Lavender,” an AI program designed by the Israeli army.
Step-by-step, NAZA pierces the so-called “fog of war”—actually fog of Israeli (and U.S.) lies—to expose why so many Palestinian children have been killed. Why so many homes have been leveled. Why Gazans were being shot down at food distribution centers. And why Israel preferred to attack at night, how “daddy’s home” signaled death sentence, and more.
“The film’s title, ‘NAZA,’ which is the Hebrew acronym for ‘collateral damage,’ is a critique of the way Israel portrays its killing of civilians,” Abraham and Szor write, including “the intent to destroy that has accompanied the military campaign from the outset.” In a nutshell, NAZA takes us inside the workings of this system of genocide.
NAZA was filmed at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv, Israel’s capital, with its interviewees’ faces hidden in the shadows to protect them from retribution. The darkness also heightens one’s focus on the terrifying crimes they were matter-of-factly revealing.
“We also turned the camera lens to Tel Aviv and its residents at night, interrogating the city as a bubble in which ordinary life continues while Palestinians are being massacred only 60 kilometers [40 miles] away,” Abraham and Szor note. “Through our gaze at the city from which the war on Gaza is being managed, we tried to observe the mechanisms of conformity that enable such widespread indifference.”
This is a film that searingly exposes the genocide in Gaza, and raises profound questions about the nature of a society that would produce such a horror, and what “normal” life rests on. It drives home the moral bankruptcy and devastating costs of complicity and complacency—including because the intelligence officers who condemned untold thousands to death were not rabid settlers or religious fanatics—they were the ‘best of the best’ from Israel’s liberal elite.
NAZA doesn’t delve into the role the U.S. played in backing, funding, arming and defending Israel’s Gaza genocide—or the complacency and willful ignore-ance that’s all too prevalent in this country. Yet NAZA nonetheless raises the same profound and urgent questions for us, most urgently and fundamentally about the nature of the system of capitalism-imperialism that is at the root of the atrocities NAZA unveils—and so much more.
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“We hope the film can contribute toward accountability for Israel’s grave crimes and justice for their victims.”
—Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who wrote and directed NAZA
At the Venice International Film Festival, NAZA won the special jury prize and received “the longest ovation in the festival’s history,” according to The Guardian, which helped produce the film. It’s currently being shown in more than more than 50 countries worldwide and will be will be available free on The Guardian’s website after late November.
Defend NAZA and Its Courageous Filmmakers
Directors Rachel Szor, left, and Yuval Abraham, winners of the special jury prize for the film NAZA at the Venice Film Festival, September 12, 2026. Photo: AP
NAZA demolishes Israeli claims that it is surgically targeting Hamas members, not civilians, that its military is the “most moral in the world,” and that it’s not carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
So in response, the Israeli state has launched a vicious and potentially deadly smear campaign against the film and its creators Szor and Abraham. Prime Minister Netanyahu threatened to revoke their citizenship. Prominent officials have accused them of treason. Right-wing forces have protested at their families’ homes, shouting “Death penalty for traitors,” and assaulted the offices of +972 and Local Call, where Abraham works. Members of the IDF even quickly put up their own website mimicking NAZA labeled, “Naza Movie | The Real Site—Watch the Naza Documentary” designed to mislead and confuse people. This deception is now being widely advertised and promoted, including on television in the U.S.
On one hand, these base attacks show how much Israel is being stung by NAZA, as well as the broader global exposure of and opposition to its towering crimes—and lies. On the other, this attack must be taken seriously and these courageous filmmakers and journalists must be supported.
The actual NAZA movie is showing in theaters now, and will be streaming for free on The Guardian website after the end of November.