NAZA | Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor

In nighttime conversations on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the systems behind Israel’s organized mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza are brought to light through the voices of the very people who designed and used them. "NAZA", by two of the four Academy Award-winning creators of "No Other Land" (2024), follows on from journalistic investigations published over the past three years by ‘The Guardian,’ the Israeli-Palestinian ‘+972 Magazine,’ and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.

As the filmmakers state: “We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israelis to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible. While filming members of Israeli’s military on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents’ generation and throughout the 20th century: how does one group of people allow the total dehumanization of another?”

"NAZA", which received the Audience Award for Best European Film at San Sebastián International Film Festival and the Special Jury Prize at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, will be screened at Onassis Stegi alongside its worldwide theatrical release.

A ‘Guardian’ and JW Films production in association with Placeholder Films and Unseen Hand, distributed internationally by mk2 and in Greece by Filmtrade and Tanweer.

We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli filmmakers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible. While filming members of Israel’s military on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents’ generation and throughout the 20th century: how does one group of people allow the total dehumanization of another? What do the inner workings of such a system look like?

Many of the revelations in the film were published almost immediately as we learned of them, in the months following the October 7th attacks, by ‘The Guardian’ (one of “NAZA”’s producers), in collaboration with reporting partners ‘+972 Magazine’ and ‘Local Call.’ The film lets us explore something deeper than we could in our investigative journalism alone: not only the words being said but also those that are not said, the silence. It is up to all of us to break that silence.

– Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor

Yuval Abraham is a filmmaker and investigative journalist.

Rachel Szor is a filmmaker and cinematographer. They are two of the four co-directors of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land” (2024).

James Wilson is a Best Picture Oscar-nominated and two-time BAFTA-winning film producer.

Jonathan Glazer is an Oscar-winning and two-time BAFTA-winning writer-director (“Sexy Beast,” “Birth,” “Under the Skin,” “The Zone of Interest”).

In 2024, Glazer and Wilson’s film “The Zone of Interest” won the Oscar for Best International Film.

What was your motivation behind making this film?

Our critique of the Israeli state has always focused on crimes that are systemic. In the film “No Other Land,” we spent five years, together with Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, documenting the army destroying Palestinian homes in order to paint a larger picture of a system of occupation and ethnic supremacy aimed at the removal of Palestinians from the West Bank. In “NAZA,” we are similarly connecting the dots of a system, gathering the testimonies of two dozen intelligence officers and soldiers and depicting the military systems used to perpetrate what a UN commission and the world’s leading human rights groups have described as a genocide.

Our focus is therefore not on sporadic war crimes committed by rogue soldiers who disobeyed orders. It is on the orders themselves, the policies, the accepted practices, the language, and logic that make those practices possible, and the people who operate within them: the system and its cogs.

This matters in part because the question of genocide is inseparable from the question of intent. Intent is often treated as something hidden in the minds of political or military leaders. But systems also reveal intent: through the rules they create, the targets they authorize, the risks they accept, and the patterns they repeatedly produce. By depicting those systems through insider testimony, we hope the film can contribute something meaningful to this discussion and help achieve accountability and justice for the grave crimes Israel has committed in Gaza.

When did you decide you would be making this film, and how did it come about?

In late 2023, following the Hamas October 7th massacre, we watched how our country’s leadership, with the support of mainstream Israeli media and large segments of the public, normalized genocidal ideas about Gaza’s population: that there are no innocent civilians living there, only “human animals” unworthy of life.

We quickly understood, through speaking to Palestinians and Israelis, that these ideas were being translated into military actions. Making a film about that system and its inner workings felt like the right thing to do when such grave crimes are being committed by people in our own society and in our name. The film shows, we believe, that the slaughter of civilians in Gaza was not simply a byproduct of war, as it was often framed by media outlets, but a premeditated, calculated, and intentional action, stemming directly from Israeli decisions.

We also knew we would need to publish our findings in real time. In late 2023, Yuval began writing investigative reports about the Israeli army—examining its AI-based targeting systems and plans for forced population transfer in Gaza—published by ‘Local Call’ and the Israeli-Palestinian independent media outlet ‘+972 Magazine,’ often in partnership with the ‘Guardian.’ Other news organizations, including ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Washington Post,’ later reported on and confirmed the existence of the same systems. The film builds on some of these investigations.

Laura Poitras has often said that documentary film is an art form, and connected to, but distinct from journalism. Why did you feel the need to revisit your work as investigative journalists as documentary filmmakers, and how did you choose the specific form and film language—visually and structurally?

Every decision in cinema, from the positioning of the frame to the structure and the edit, is about what is not seen or heard as much as it is about what is seen or heard. Cinema allows you to examine silence alongside speech, presence alongside absence, a city being constructed alongside a city being destroyed. In the film, we look at the city of Tel Aviv, Israel’s liberal hub, while another city, Gaza, 44 miles (60 km) away, is being destroyed. Gaza is present through its absence. This form allows us to depict violence indirectly, in the hope that it might break through the numbness and inaction of too many people who are already used to the many direct images of violence.

When discussing his film “The Zone of Interest,” Jonathan Glazer, our executive producer, explained his thinking on the ethics of representation by saying that the victims may be out of sight in his film, but they are “never out of mind.” We were influenced by this idea when making “NAZA” and developing its visual language. The film is looking at the Israeli side, at Israeli houses, at Israeli actions—but it never lets go of its reason for being: the slaughter in Gaza and what it is that makes it possible.

When editing the film, we knew that we would want to retain the power of the ‘documentary moment’ that unfolds in front of the camera. This was particularly challenging in a film based on testimonies that needed to be anonymized. This is why we left a lot of space for silences, for questions and answers, trying to structure the film more as a dialogue, a pursuit of truth through cinema, rather than a journalistic montage of talking heads.

What, besides possible security concerns, appealed to you about nighttime interviews on rooftops as the location for your film?

It felt like the only option for the film. The reality in Israel-Palestine has always been dark, but since October 7th, we have been engulfed in total darkness, and dawn is nowhere in sight. Our film is a reflection of the time it was made in.

Darkness is seen as an enabler of crimes, actions that need to be kept secret because of their atrocious nature. But darkness is also an enabler of honesty; people say things when it’s dark that they would not have said when it’s bright, and some of the most intense, revealing moments of the film happen when the lights are out. Without honesty about what happened in the dark, we won’t be able to move into the light again.

Your interviewees illustrate their testimony about the hi-tech applications used in Gaza with decidedly low-tech, hand-drawn, pen-on-paper diagrams. How and when did you settle on this striking formal choice?

In order to kill other human beings, people often need to represent them in a way that diminishes their humanity, turning them into numbers or statistics, viewing them as dots on a screen, or casting them simply as ‘NAZA,’ a military acronym in Hebrew which is euphemistically translated as ‘collateral damage.’ By asking these soldiers to draw by hand the systems they used, we felt we would not only be gaining important insight into how they worked, but also insight into the way individuals involved in remote mass killing view and represent their victims, insight into the gaze of the perpetrator.

Why does your camera move from the interview setting into the skyline and details of everyday life seen through windows or on the streets?

Every night at 8 pm, millions of Israelis gather around their televisions to watch the news. It is a kind of national ritual. The film, which observes the city of Tel Aviv almost as if under surveillance, examines these rituals and asks what role they play in producing conformity.

As we hear about the way in which mass surveillance of an entire society in Gaza fueled the mass killing of that very society, we turn the lens back onto Tel Aviv, interrogating the city as a bubble in which ordinary life continues while people are being killed sixty kilometers away.

Israel’s main military headquarters is located in the heart of Tel Aviv. Many of the people leading the bombing campaign in intelligence units come from Tel Aviv and are considered to be Israel’s social and intellectual elite, those in opposition to Netanyahu. The film is a testament to the role they played, a reminder that to commit an atrocity of such scale, all parts of society need to take part.

Who are the interviewees in the film?

As you might imagine, “NAZA” has been produced in a very careful way over the last three years with tight security, because of the highly sensitive content and potentially damning evidence of our interviewees.

The interviewees in the film are 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. They have all been involved in the surveillance or remote killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Their appearance and voices have been digitally altered to disguise their identities.

Journalists often rely on confidential sources as a means to pursue the truth about state crimes. Still, granting confidentiality to people who, by their own accounts, have been involved in serious crimes is not something we take lightly. It was clear that the officers would not speak otherwise, fearing retaliation from the Israeli state for doing so. It is because their testimonies implicate a much larger system, and because the killing in Gaza is ongoing, that we felt an obligation to make their accounts public.

One of the interviewees in the film says that if his identity is revealed, Israel will put him in prison for exposing what the military did in Gaza. This made me think: why did these people even speak with you?

Almost all of the Israeli media has been so uninterested in the civilian consequences of Israel’s bombing of Gaza that a vacuum has been created, into which it was possible to enter. Sometimes, all it took was asking the right questions.

Different people clearly had different motivations for answering those questions. Some said they came to the army shocked by the scale of the killing on October 7th, but over time came to understand that they themselves had become involved in serious crimes. These sources often spoke from a place of shame or guilt. They talked in Hebrew, and we often felt they were speaking to other Israelis, so they reckon with what they were sent to do on their behalf. Others were motivated by some kind of pride, not always in the killing itself, but in the knowledge they had acquired over years of service in secretive units, or in what they regarded as a professional accomplishment.

Our film does not dwell on their motivations. It does not follow the journalistic process of finding the interviewees, nor does it explore in depth how they wrestle with guilt, shame, pride, or responsibility for what they have done. That is a deliberate choice. This particular film is concerned only with the killing itself and with what makes that killing possible. To spend too much time on the sources’ motivations for speaking, their remorse, their pride, their political opinions, would risk shifting the center of gravity away from the victims, which is something we did not want to do.

What were some of the challenges you ran into while making the film?

The sources involved in Israel’s aerial bombing campaign of Gaza, considered one of the deadliest in modern history for civilians, serve in the country’s most secretive and elite military intelligence units. We had to spend months, and eventually years, tracking down the right people, who in turn often took months before agreeing to speak in front of a camera. Militaries are built around a decentralization of duty: each officer is responsible for a part of the kill chain, while the full consequences of an operation are often dispersed across many different people, units, and decisions. This is why we couldn’t rely on a handful of sources to make the claims in the film and worked to find two dozen of them. We also had to work under strict security limitations, knowing that the Israeli state had not authorized these people to speak to us, and they were taking a risk in doing so.

You mentioned before the film “No Other Land,” which was a collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians. “NAZA” is directed by the Israeli team. Why?

This film looks at our society. It is about our armed forces and the consequences of their actions. If our Palestinian colleagues tried to call up intelligence officers, as we have done, they would likely be arrested and tortured or even murdered. The Committee to Protect Journalists documented more than 200 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7th, while dozens were detained for lengthy periods, the majority never charged with any crime. Therefore, we felt it is our unique responsibility as Israelis to use the privilege we have under this unfair system to examine it from within, and to look at the place we come from.

But Israeli soldiers do not somehow possess a more truthful version of events than Palestinian victims. The truth about the horrors of Gaza was apparent to many, and in our minds should have been clear to everyone, from the very start of Israel’s assault, through testimony of Palestinians in Gaza who bravely documented their own destruction, often paying with their lives. It is precisely because we live in a world that so often refused to believe the victims and minimized their testimonies that we felt an urge to collect testimony from inside the system that was attacking them. We hope that it can make that denial more difficult, as denial allows those crimes to persist. And they continue to this day.

What more can you say about the name of the film, “NAZA”? What is it meant to evoke in audiences?

‘NAZA’ is a military acronym derived from נזק אגבי (Nezek Agavi, or ‘collateral damage’), which is used euphemistically by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that it expects will be killed in an airstrike. It is a testament to the fact that much of the civilian killing in Gaza was done with full knowledge and not by mistake, as some have claimed.

“NAZA” is also a critique of the way in which framing the killing as ‘collateral’ obscures its deliberate and calculated nature. When the lives of countless civilians are deemed to be meaningless, they can all be turned into ‘NAZA,’ and any strike can effectively be justified no matter the harm to civilians.

This is especially dangerous in an era of artificial intelligence and big data, when it is possible to produce an endless stream of so-called military justifications, rendering every civilian slaughter as ‘NAZA,’ collateral damage to some target generated with the help of AI, and therefore avoiding scrutiny. This turns a cornerstone of international law, the obligation to attack only military targets, into a tool that legitimizes the slaughter it was intended to prevent.

Ex-military Israeli intelligence chief Aharon Haliva said in a leaked recording: “For everything that happened on October 7, for every one of us who died on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn’t matter now—children or not. I’m not speaking out of revenge but as a message for future generations. They need a Nakba now and then to feel the price.” We think that one way the Israeli military was able to bring a genocidal vision like Haliva’s into military practice, while obscuring its nature, was by defining much of the killing as ‘collateral,’ or ‘NAZA.’

‘The Guardian’ is a global news organization that delivers fearless, independent journalism. Guardian Documentaries are committed to telling urgent contemporary stories with unique artistic vision. Producing, curating, and commissioning films from around the world, Guardian Documentaries have won critical acclaim, including an Oscar in 2021 for “Colette” and a 2022 BAFTA Film Award for “The Black Cop.”