Naza Is One of the Most Important Films of Our Time

Among the many shocking facts in Naza, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s unflinching expose of systematic Israeli war crimes in Gaza, is a title at the end noting that many of the revelations in the film were previously published in the Guardian newspaper, +972 Magazine, and Local Call. At the picture’s Thursday press conference in Venice, not long before the film received what might be the longest-ever standing ovation in film-festival history, Szor also reminded everyone that Palestinian journalists have reported on these facts. In other words, the information has been out there for months, and much of the world has shrugged, if not ignored it completely. Perhaps it will be hard to ignore now, with the appearance of this starkly shot, damning documentary, which was a very late and out-of-the-blue addition to the Venice and New York Film Festival lineups. That secrecy was warranted. Naza is a bombshell.

Abraham and Szor were the Israeli members of the four-person team that directed 2024’s Oscar-winning No Other Land. They say they made Naza “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.” The film’s setup is disarmingly simple. In a series of interviews, Abraham sits atop the rooftops of Tel Aviv with 24 different Israeli intelligence officers, their faces obscured by night and their voices modified to preserve their identities, as they tell him what they did.

Many of these men and women designed and operated the systems Israel used to pick targets. The term “NAZA” refers to the number of civilians that might be killed as collateral damage in a strike on a specific target. So, for example, 4 NAZA would mean four other people killed — women, children, elderly, the term doesn’t differentiate. Over the course of the film, we’ll hear of 15 NAZA, 20 NAZA, 200 NAZA. One officer recalls blowing up a building with 500 people in it to go after one target. They admit to knowingly wiping out entire neighborhoods, fully aware of the catastrophic human toll. These were not outliers, or accidents, or isolated incidents. The murders were, again, part of a system. “Do you think it’s a genocide?” Abraham asks one of his subjects. “Yes, absolutely,” is the response. 

Officers talk about using predictive artificial intelligence to determine who might be a Hamas operative, based on similar patterns of behavior, and then repeatedly killing innocent people. “There are not many military targets in Gaza, but there are thousands of homes,” one interviewee says, noting that it was a lot easier to bomb people’s houses, regularly wiping out their families but missing the actual targets. “It was like a video game,” another says. “Everything was done remotely.” (In training, they were shown the Aaron Paul and Helen Mirren vehicle Eye in the Sky.) One guy, incredibly, tells Abraham there are all sorts of other things he can’t talk about. In other words, the horrific revelations in the film are just the tip of the iceberg.

The modern cityscape of Tel Aviv, with its gleaming skyscrapers, its huge and well-lit residential buildings, looms over the picture, both as a haunting background and as telling cutaways. We see distant nocturnal glimpses of open windows and curtains, revealing ordinary citizens in their kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms, quietly cooking or studying or doing yoga or watching TV. It’s a striking contrast to the Gazans who were blown to pieces in their homes while attempting to live their lives. These two locations share a grim historical connection: Many of the residents of Gaza were themselves displaced from Tel Aviv in the 1940s. One interviewee recalls looking around the once-prosperous Rimal neighborhood of Gaza, which he says reminded him of Tel Aviv, with its glass towers. Now, of course, Rimal has been reduced to a field of endless rubble. He says he went into destroyed homes and found photo albums and school textbooks after entire families had been wiped out. “We erased history,” he says.

Tel Aviv is also the headquarters of Israel’s military apparatus. As a result, we also see military conference rooms among all these windows and buildings, an ironic counterpoint to the oft-repeated claim about Hamas using “human shields.” One drone operator talks about going out for lunch or hanging out with their friends in Tel Aviv after demolishing people’s houses in Gaza from miles away. 

Again, to be clear, they knew exactly what they were doing. Watching Naza, we realize that Israel’s surveillance over Gaza is total. Every building has a predetermined military code. They know who lives where, on which floor, in which room, and with how many people. After 1967, Israel did not allow Gazans to build their own infrastructure. In the 1970s, Israel developed Gaza’s communication systems, then used that to closely monitor the entire population. Interviewees describe hacking little girls’ phones to see when their fathers came home and then bombing their houses, listening while the people on the line screamed and pleaded for help, while mothers cried over their burning daughters. “I’d hear the final moments of a person’s life,” one man reflects.

The spare, focused style of Naza has a grim, artful beauty, all in service of the subject matter. The results are impossible to shake. The style is purposefully antiseptic; aside from one brief section of footage from Gaza toward the end of the film, there’s nothing graphic here. And yet, I nearly threw up. One man recalls watching snipers kill Palestinians waiting in line for food after Israel blocked supplies from entering the North as a way to push people to the South. One subject says he’d bomb little boys and then watch as dogs fed on their bodies. Another man talks about visiting Poland as a child, learning about the Holocaust, and coming to understand that the Nazis were pure evil. “I still believe the Nazis were evil,” he says. “What does that make me?”

Sign up for The Critics

A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.

Become a Subscriber

Already a subscriber? Sign in

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice

By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.