The Israeli directing team behind the 2024 Oscar-winning film No Other Land, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, have now written and directed a new documentary, NAZA, which details the systematic targeting and murder of civilians in Gaza. The film’s title comes from the Israeli intelligence acronym that is used to describe human collateral damage killed while eliminating a targeted person. The directors make clear that they are not interested in “sporadic war crimes committed by rogue soldiers,” but rather the calculated, state-sponsored, mass murder that was conducted with military precision. The directors make clear that these mass killings were not an accident of war, but intentional. The film also suggests that the brutality of the war had a geopolitical goal to “thwart peace.”
The film is based upon 24 interviews with Israeli intelligence officers and IDF soldiers conducted on a rooftop in Tel Aviv, along with three years of investigative reporting from Israel’s +972 Magazine. Most of the interviewees came from Israel’s social elite and from prestigious intelligence units. The interviews were done with tight security and care to protect the identity of the Israeli personnel. Some Israelis in the film clearly had remorse for the blood on their hands, but others had pride. Producers of the film included Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.
The dehumanization of the innocent civilian NAZA is so extreme that each death was often considered a bonus and encouraged. The emphasis was always “quantity, not quality,” according to one IDF soldier. Another soldier spoke of mass murder being promoted “as a video game,” and said that at times the killing could feel “exhilarating.” One interviewee casually discussed the death of an estimated 500 civilian, noncombatant NAZA during the bombing of an entire city block in order to kill one targeted suspect.
The story starts in the “Murder Factory” where AI is used to generate possible targets, and ends in the “annihilation zones” in Gaza where anything living would be targeted. The preferred method of killing was to strike at night when the target was asleep at home with his family, and the target’s cellphone was at his bedside. The target’s phone was hacked and surveilled, and often the last phone conversations were monitored to confirm the target’s location and intention to remain there for hours.
According to +972 Magazine, speaking out in this film put all the participants at risk, but at least some chose to tell their story “to penetrate the walls of denial and justification” to confront the Israeli public and the international community with the reality of their action or inaction.
