‘Land of The Walking Dead’

CrossFireArabia
Features
August 4, 2025

By Fawaz Turki

No doubt you’ve noticed. There are rational men and women engaged in the mainstream media of the Western world who still allow eroded figures of speech to inhabit their common parlance when they write about the deranged horrors in Gaza, as if what is happening there is a “war,” typically an open and often prolonged, garden variety military conflict between the armed forces of two nations or groups.

What we are in reality witnessing in that tormented, 142-square-mile strip of land — once described as an open-air prison camp but now as an open-air death camp — is clearly not a war but the most anguishing humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century, one that challenges the shared sense of morality inherent in our global dialogue of cultures.

We need not describe these horrors inflicted on the 2.3 million souls who “live” – yes, this word needs to be enclosed in quotation marks – in Gaza, a people now hunted beyond all human endurance.

We know these horrors already. We’ve read about them. We’ve watched them on our screens. And they have shocked us to the core of our humanity.

Two worlds

The enclave we call Gaza is today a wasteland whose destruction has been Carthaginian in scale, where starved Palestinians are neither dead nor alive. They and their skeletal children have been ghoulishly described as “walking corpses.”

You see them at dangerous food distribution centres where trigger-happy Israeli soldiers gratuitously kill dozens of them daily, and where their humanity is so reduced to a fragment that they are willing to die for a bag of rice, a quart of milk, a jerrycan of water.

Yet, a few kilometres away, across the border, supermarkets are loaded with food and people go about their quotidian lives. Walking their streets. Drinking their coffee. Watching their films. Reading their Torahs. Visiting their dentists. Hugging their children. Listening to music. And making love.

Surely, these are two orders of reality whose spatial and temporal coexistence the mind baulks at reconciling and the imagination recoils at envisioning.

Questions crowd upon us.

What justification do those who deny children access to food have for preventing them from meeting their basic needs? What propels the need in one people to calculatedly inflict such repeated, unspeakable savagery on another?

And what drives the seemingly normal Israelis to give such a massive echo of approval to the racist bellowing of their political and military leaders, instead of turning away from it in nauseated disbelief, thus reducing whatever there is in them of the human and restoring what there is of the beast? (It is a sad fact that progressive Israelis have always failed to insinuate into, let alone impose on society, the humane rigour inherent in their beliefs.)

Writers, like other laymen, would do well to abstain from taking part in a debate such as this that the therapeutic community considers its own. But reasons there must be, albeit dark and disquieting ones.

Blinkered world

One thing is plain. Gaza is burning. Its analogue is hell. So, why has the global conscience not compelled the powers that be to intervene and put an end to the genocide in Gaza, an end to the immeasurable agonies of its people? And if not now, when?

Very simply this: The US, the self-styled “leader of the free world” and putative “maker and shaker” of international affairs, insists on maintaining its long-held, notoriously right-or-wrong support of Israel.

So much so, it has repeatedly used its veto power to sabotage any efforts by other members of the UN Security Council to end the mayhem in the besieged enclave.

And governments elsewhere in the Western world have opted to become mere onlookers of that mayhem, that is, where they are not closet backers of it.

Yet, that is not the end of that. That global conscience has already become something to reckon with, having progressively morphed into – to paraphrase Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamato’s famous observation about Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbour — a sleeping giant, now awakened and filled with potent resolve.

True, the silence with which the Western world has met the horrors in Gaza may have raised serious doubts about the gravitas attributed to the foundational values of Western liberalism, showing them as a sham.

But the majority in that same world have now bravely taken a stand against their governments, seeing it not just as a moral imperative but also as a means to speak truth to power.

And by adopting that posture, they in effect tell themselves, each other and the world at large that human beings are complicit in that which leaves them indifferent, for by not speaking up, they are indirectly giving their approval to the prevailing order.

Let no one be in doubt that these folks’ voices have been heard.

Their voices have resonated, loudly, clearly, and impactfully, even in the US, traditionally the heartland where support of Israel was once robotic. Indeed, signs of that shift are already evident in public surveys, including the most recent Pew poll.

Yes, more than 18,500 children have so far been killed by Israel in Gaza, a little strip of land now reduced to being a place where the dead reach out to drag the living into the abyss of their mass graves, as a final act of mercy in a place where living has lost all meaning.

As for us Palestinians who, by a trick of fate, are “here,” fed beyond our need, safe in our beds and in our streets and protected against disorder in our daily lives, what is happening “there”, in that parcel of hell, remains indivisible to our identity and will remain tattooed, in indelible ink. It is etched in our collective memory and will remain with us for generations.

And our history books will tell that no child slaughtered in Gaza was ever forgotten, no brutality committed there was ever forgiven.

Fawaz Turki was born in Haifa in 1940. He fled with his family to Lebanon following the 1948 Nakba. He is a Palestinian-American journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington, DC. His publications include the autobiography The Disinherited: Journey of Palestinian Exile (1972), Soul in Exile (New York, 1988) and Exile’s Return: The Making of a Palestinian-American (New York, 1995). TRT World.

CrossFireArabia

Dr. Marwan Asmar holds a PhD from Leeds University and is a freelance writer specializing on the Middle East. He has worked as a journalist since the early 1990s in Jordan and the Gulf countries, and been widely published, including at Albawaba, Gulf News, Al Ghad, World Press Review and others.

Features News

NAZA: When Israel’s Killing Machine Speaks in Its Own Voice

marwan
September 11, 2026

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.

Features News

Palestinians Slam Adidas For Pro-Israel PR Campaign

Heba
September 10, 2026

Two Palestinian amputee athletes from the Gaza Strip condemned the global sports equipment company Adidas for using an Israeli soldier as an advertising figure for its products, describing the move as “a blatant bias toward the Israeli killers and a whitewashing of the crimes of genocide.”

The two athletes, speaking to Anadolu, said they had decided on a “comprehensive boycott and abandonment of the company’s products” and called on the Arab and Muslim sporting community and free people around the world to support them and stop buying its products.

Former Israeli soldier Shalev Biton, who participated in the Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip in 2021, appeared in a local campaign promoting the Single Shoe service launched by Adidas.

The service allows amputees, or those who need only one shoe, to purchase it for 50% of the price of a full pair.

The campaign sparked widespread international, Arab and Palestinian discontent, amid the suffering of thousands of amputees in the Gaza Strip due to a shortage of prosthetic limbs and the raw materials needed to manufacture them.

‘Whitewashing the image of the killers’

Ahmed Abu Nar, an amputee football player in Gaza, said that Adidas, a company of its size, using an Israeli sniper who participated in the war on the Strip was “a provocative act and a deliberate attempt to whitewash the image of those committing war crimes against civilians.”

Abu Nar, who lost his left leg as a result of direct fire from an Israeli sniper, expressed his astonishment at “using an Israeli soldier to advertise and market this shoe, at a time when it could have used many other people.”

He added: “The company has expertise and specialized teams to study every step, and what happened was not a mere coincidence, but a calculated decision to ignore the victims and celebrate the killer.”

Abu Nar criticized the company’s handling of the controversy and its decision to limit the apology and removal of the advertisement to pages directed only at the Middle East, noting that “the company’s global page did not address the matter.”

Under pressure and amid calls to boycott it, the German sportswear company Adidas apologized Monday through its Arabic-language Instagram account for launching an advertising campaign featuring an Israeli soldier.

The Adidas Arabia account has relatively limited reach, with only 1.4 million followers, a figure that is dwarfed by the more than 29.6 million followers of its global account.

Abu Nar confirmed that he had made a firm decision to boycott Adidas and dispose of all its sports equipment, saying: “This decision is irreversible for us as athletes in Gaza.”

He added: “The company applies double standards, between us being victims and being exposed to death, bombing and destruction at every moment, while on the other hand they said the war had stopped, and to this day it has not stopped. On our way to the field, we are at any moment afraid that a bombing may occur.”

Since Oct. 8, 2023, Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza, leaving more than 73,000 Palestinians dead, more than 174,000 wounded, and destruction affecting 90% of the infrastructure.

Bias toward the occupation

For his part, Hassan Abu Karim, 43, a board member of the Palestine Amputee Football Association, denounced what he described as “racial discrimination and double standards” practiced by global companies in their handling of the Palestinian issue.

Abu Karim, who lost his foot to an Israeli shell in 2006 during an incursion into the Maghazi area, said: “At a time when our association has struggled since its establishment in 2018 to provide the most basic necessities, including shoes and crutches for amputee athletes, we find the global company opening its doors and providing its capabilities and sponsorship to a soldier who participated in massacres against our people.”

“This greatly affects the sporting situation in Palestine, particularly people with amputations who had been waiting for international institutions and companies to sponsor them or stand by their side,” he added.

Abu Karim, a former player for Maghazi Services Club who participated in international sporting initiatives for amputees, explained that it would be more appropriate for global companies to show solidarity with victims living under siege and bombardment and to safeguard the rights of people with disabilities.

He continued: “As an athlete, when I saw this advertisement, it became clear to me that they had ignored the suffering of people with disabilities or amputees in Gaza.”

He considered the use of the Israeli soldier as an advertising figure to be “abhorrent racial discrimination,” calling on Adidas “not to be racist and not to side with the occupation and killing.”

Abu Karim called on Arab and Muslim athletes and sporting institutions around the world to stand alongside Palestinian athletes and confront what he described as “racist policies” through a broad boycott of the company’s products until it “complies with humanitarian values and justice.”

Days after the advertisement was published, criticism escalated across social media platforms as accounts supportive of the Palestinian cause republished images of the campaign, pointing out that Biton had lost his leg while participating in the Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip in 2021.

Israel’s Channel 15 said posts that recirculated the advertisement received millions of views, while a hashtag calling for a boycott of Adidas spread, accompanied by thousands of calls to boycott the company.

Users compared the Israeli soldier with the thousands of Palestinians whose limbs had been amputated during the genocide, accusing Adidas of ignoring their suffering.

More than 5,000 amputation cases

The figures concerning amputees in the Gaza Strip reveal the extent of the contrast highlighted by Adidas’ critics.

According to World Health Organization estimates issued in May 2026, the Strip recorded between 5,161 and 6,710 limb amputations since October 2023.

The organization indicated that around 43,000 people in Gaza sustained injuries likely to permanently change their lives, including approximately 10,000 children.

It noted that the number of serious limb injuries had reached around 22,000 cases by May, while the total number of injuries at that time had reached approximately 172,000 since Oct. 8, 2023.

In a related context, figures reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Aug. 14, 2026, confirmed that children account for around 18% of amputation cases in Gaza, while specialized rehabilitation services for children are unavailable in the Strip.

The suffering of amputees does not end with the loss of their limbs, as it is followed by a long process of surgical operations, physical therapy, rehabilitation and the search for a suitable prosthetic limb. Anadolu

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