CROSSFIREARABIA – There are documentaries that expose a war by showing its victims, and there are films that attempt something altogether different: Entering the machinery that produces those victims.

NAZA, the disturbing new documentary by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, belongs firmly to the second category.

Premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on 10 September, NAZA does not principally take its cameras into Gaza’s shattered streets, hospitals or tent camps. Instead, Abraham and Szor turn their cameras towards Israel — specifically towards 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers who participated in the systems of surveillance, target selection and killing that have shaped Israel’s war in Gaza.

It is this inversion that makes NAZA potentially one of the most consequential films yet made about the Gaza war.

The Palestinians are overwhelmingly the people who die. But for most of the film, the camera remains on the other side of the border, among people who helped determine who would be targeted and how.

The result, according to Peter Bradshaw’s review in The Guardian, is a profoundly unsettling film that casts a “chilling light” on what has happened in Gaza. The Guardian is not merely reviewing the documentary: it produced NAZA, which grew out of investigations undertaken by the newspaper together with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language Local Call between 2023 and 2025.

A word that turns civilians into numbers

The horror begins with the title.

“NAZA” is described by the filmmakers as an Israeli military term for the civilian casualties expected in an attack.

Before a bomb falls, in other words, civilians may already exist inside the targeting calculation as a number.

This is perhaps the film’s most disturbing proposition because it moves the argument beyond the familiar dispute over whether civilians were accidentally killed during attacks on Hamas targets. NAZA asks a more uncomfortable question: What happens when civilian deaths become incorporated into the architecture of targeting itself?

The Israeli witnesses describe systems in which intelligence, artificial intelligence, mass surveillance and enormous quantities of personal data are combined to identify suspected targets.

According to testimony presented in the film, computer systems analysed telephone behaviour and other information to identify people suspected of connections to Hamas. Targets could then be attacked at their homes, sometimes at night, despite the presence of their families.

One witness refers to an error rate of around 15 percent. Another describes an expected “Naza” figure of roughly 20 civilians for an operation.

Other testimony goes considerably further.

The Guardian’s investigation accompanying the film reports accounts of neighbourhoods being destroyed even when Israeli forces estimated that significant numbers of residents remained inside, civilian homes being systematically burned and Palestinians being killed around food-distribution areas.

The effect is to transform the vocabulary of “collateral damage.” Collateral damage ordinarily suggests something unintended. NAZA suggests calculation.

The horror is 60 kilometres away

Abraham and Szor make an inspired visual decision.

The interviews take place at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv.

The witnesses’ identities must be protected. Faces remain largely in darkness and appearances and voices are digitally altered. Yet behind these anonymous figures another character gradually emerges: Tel Aviv itself.

Apartments glow.

Traffic moves.

People continue their ordinary lives.

And Gaza is only about 60 kilometres away.

Bradshaw draws particular attention to this juxtaposition in his Guardian review. The camera periodically leaves the intelligence officers and wanders across Tel Aviv’s illuminated apartment buildings, observing fragments of comfortable civilian existence while another civilian population, almost within geographical touching distance, has been subjected to extraordinary destruction.

This distance is central to NAZA.

Modern warfare permits killing without proximity.

The person gathering intelligence does not necessarily see the family beneath the bomb. The analyst studies a screen. An algorithm produces possibilities. Someone approves a target. Someone else presses another button.

Each individual performs one function. The system performs the killing.

It is therefore significant that Abraham and Szor say their film is not primarily concerned with individual “rogue soldiers.” Their subject is something larger: the orders, procedures, assumptions and language through which extraordinary violence becomes ordinary institutional activity.

They call it the story of “the system and its cogs.” 

That may ultimately be the most important sentence attached to the film.

Not monsters, but technicians

One of NAZA’s unsettling qualities appears to be the ordinariness of the people speaking.

These are not cinematic villains.

They are technicians, intelligence officers and educated professionals. Some appear troubled by what they participated in. Others describe operations with a detachment that is arguably more disturbing than anger or hatred would have been.

One interviewee describes the experience as resembling a video game. Another recalls surveillance of two young sisters used to determine when their father, a suspected Hamas operative, was home. According to Screen Daily’s account of the film, an attack subsequently killed the girls and other members of the family — while the intended target was apparently not there. (Screen Daily⁠Error! Filename not specified.)

This is where NAZA enters territory familiar from Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest.

The connection is not accidental: Glazer is an executive producer of NAZA, alongside a production team associated with that Oscar-winning film.

The Zone of Interest explored horror through normality: Auschwitz existed beside a family home in which people gardened, ate meals and raised children.

NAZA constructs a contemporary and inevitably controversial echo.

Tel Aviv sleeps.

Screens glow.

Analysts work.

Gaza burns.

The significance of Israeli testimony

There is another reason this documentary matters.

Palestinians have described the destruction of Gaza since October 2023 in extraordinary detail. Palestinian journalists have filmed dead children, flattened neighbourhoods, destroyed hospitals, displaced families and mass graves.

Palestinian testimony has never been absent.

The uncomfortable question is why another form of testimony — that of Israelis participating in the system — may carry greater weight with Western audiences.

Abraham and Szor themselves appear conscious of the contradiction.

They do not claim Israelis are required to reveal what Palestinians have somehow failed to reveal. The destruction is already visible. Instead, NAZA tries to document the institutional mechanisms behind what everyone can see.

This distinction matters.

The film is less concerned with proving that Gaza was destroyed than explaining how destruction became administratively possible.

The 24 witnesses describe the infrastructure behind the explosion: intelligence databases, surveillance, algorithms, targeting procedures, permissible civilian casualty calculations and the bureaucratic division of responsibility.

It is the anatomy of remote warfare.

From

No Other Land to NAZA

Abraham and Szor are particularly interesting filmmakers because NAZA follows directly from No Other Land, which they made with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal.

That film documented the destruction and displacement confronting Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank and won the 2025 Academy Award for best documentary.

The directors themselves see continuity between the two works.

In No Other Land, they have said, the filmmakers documented individual demolitions and acts of violence in order to reveal the larger structure behind them. In NAZA, the approach is similar: collect individual testimonies until the architecture of the system becomes visible.

But NAZA goes somewhere darker.

The West Bank film largely observed what occupation does to people.

The Gaza film asks the people operating the machinery to explain how it works.

The film’s weakness

Bradshaw nevertheless identifies an important problem.

All 24 witnesses are anonymous.

There are compelling reasons for this. They could face serious professional, legal and personal consequences. The filmmakers reportedly spent considerable effort technologically disguising their identities, and completion of that anonymisation process was one reason the film was announced unusually late for Venice.

Yet anonymity inevitably weakens testimony.

The viewer cannot independently judge who these people are, what positions they held or how much direct knowledge they possessed.

Bradshaw argues that having nobody prepared to attach a name and face to the allegations reduces their evidentiary impact, even while acknowledging the danger they would face by doing so.

It is a legitimate criticism.

Yet the cumulative nature of the film appears designed partly to answer it. There is not one anonymous voice but two dozen of them, while many of the systems they describe were previously investigated journalistically.

The film therefore asks to be judged not as a collection of isolated confessions but as a mosaic.

Where the Guardian review becomes debatable

There is one element of Bradshaw’s otherwise powerful review that deserves scrutiny.

When one of the Israeli interviewees reaches for an analogy with Nazism, Bradshaw resists it. Gaza, he argues, should not be equated with the Holocaust, suggesting Dresden as a more historically appropriate comparison.

His caution is understandable. Historical analogies can illuminate, but they can also flatten fundamentally different events. Yet perhaps the more interesting point is not whether Gaza “is” Auschwitz, Dresden or anything else.

It is who raises the comparison.

The discomfort comes from an Israeli participant in the military system looking back at European history and then looking at his own actions.

The film need not settle that comparison. The fact that an insider feels compelled to ask the question is itself part of the testimony.

A documentary about distance

Ultimately, NAZA appears to be about several kinds of distance. There is the physical distance between Tel Aviv and Gaza. There is technological distance between the person operating a computer and the human being beneath an aircraft. There is bureaucratic distance between collecting intelligence and dropping a bomb.

There is linguistic distance between saying “civilian” and saying “Naza.”

And there is moral distance — the extraordinary ability of a modern society to continue eating dinner, watching television and going to work while devastating violence is being inflicted only kilometres away.

That is why the nighttime Tel Aviv setting may be the film’s most effective image. The lights continue burning in the apartments. The intelligence officers sit in darkness. And beyond the horizon lies Gaza.

When the perpetrators provide the evidence

NAZA will inevitably generate political controversy. Some will challenge the testimony. Others will challenge the filmmakers’ terminology and conclusions. Israel has consistently argued that it targets Hamas rather than civilians and that Hamas’s operations within populated areas place civilians in danger.

But NAZA changes the nature of that debate.

Its central witnesses are not Hamas officials, Palestinian activists or foreign campaigners. They are Israelis who say they participated in the system.

And Abraham and Szor’s achievement is apparently not to force these people into dramatic confessions but simply to allow them to describe their work.

That may explain why the film sounds so disturbing. There are no screaming interrogations.

No theatrical confrontations. No need for them. The men and women behind the screens explain the algorithms, surveillance, intelligence and calculations.

Gradually the vocabulary of technology gives way to something painfully simple.

Every “Naza” was a person. Someone’s daughter. Someone’s father. Someone asleep inside an apartment.

Someone waiting for food.

And perhaps that is the lasting importance of NAZA. After nearly three years in which Gaza’s destruction has repeatedly been presented through arguments over numbers, military necessity and proportionality, Abraham and Szor take the audience behind those numbers.

They show us the people who calculated them.

And they ask what happens to a society when human beings can first be converted into numbers — and then those numbers become acceptable.

NAZA does not merely document the devastation of Gaza. It documents the bureaucracy that made devastation possible.