NAZA

After last year’s The Voice of Hind Rajab shocked audiences with its heartbreaking true story of a Palestinian girl trapped in a car under fire by the Israeli military, NAZA (literally, collateral damage) pulls the camera back and offers viewers the widest vision possible of the inhuman, ongoing war in Gaza. It is a film shot over three years in complete secrecy, and its revelations leave the viewer shaken.

The British production, which is the only doc in competition, is a shocker that leaves the audience speechless with dismay at the accumulation of horror and mass killing of civilians, in a battle that turns innocent women and children into calculated casualty numbers. It is perhaps a different sense of outrage then Hind Rajab’s story provokes, because it is so coldly military, like an AI war in which morality plays no role.

NAZA was a last-minute addition to the festival program designed to give  filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor time to anonymize their interviews with 24 whistleblowers who talk frankly about how Israel’s Secret Service is systematically destroying Gaza and its residents. Instead of recounting individual stories, like producer Rashid Masharawi’s valuable anthologies of Gazan voices From Ground Zero, NAZA gives the audience a rare view into the minds of those who aim the missiles, program the drones and push the destruct button.

Abraham and Szor are two of the four filmmakers behind the Israeli-Palestinian documentary No Other Land, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film in 2024. To make NAZA, they held secret interviews with Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, from technicians to members of elite military groups. The body of the 80-minute film takes place on the rooftops of tall buildings in Tel Aviv, from where the city twinkles with lights at their feet and an occasional missile rockets across the night sky. In the dark, the faces of those who give testimony are bare outlines and their voices digitally distorted. As one man says, if his identity was learned, he would be arrested and sent to prison.

The film is based on investigations published between 2023 and 2025 by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian, about how Palestinians who were presumed to be members of Hamas were put under surveillance and remotely targeted, usually in their homes in Gaza. Exploiting their ability to tap cell phones through Gaza’s telephone exchanges, which they control, Israeli intelligence is able to locate virtually anyone by following signals emitted by their phones. If the signals consistently came from one apartment in the same building, the target is presumed to live there.

The witnesses give detailed descriptions of how entire neighborhoods are sometimes targeted to be razed to the ground to kill Hamas operatives – who sometimes are not at home. Their families are killed as NAZAs – innocent victims under the rubble of bombed buildings – and their numbers are enormous. But more chilling than the percentage of casualties are the tales recounted by the former intelligence operatives.

Through telephones they can listen to family conversations, hear the TV shows the kids are watching, and hear their mothers’ screams after the bombs fall. One witness says that the streets are filled with corpses no one takes away,

Some of the men who program the air attacks on Gaza and the destruction of residential buildings seem oblivious to the mass murder they are causing. One even compares drone warfare to a video game and says their snipers had fun killing Palestinians who ran across an exposed valley when food shipments arrived. But others are more soul-searching. When asked why they took part in a genocide, one admits, “because we wanted to.”

As the film draws to a close, the face of P.M. Bibi Netanyahu appears to remind viewers that the war of destruction in Gaza is political, and that The Hague tribunal is still waiting to judge Netanyahu for crimes against humanity. Film lovers may connect more, however, with a brief montage from Claude Lanzmann’s famed film Shoah screened in a tribute to the director at the Jerusalem Cinematheque; the context of indiscriminate warfare and mass killings, this time perpetrated by Israel, could not be more bitter.

Directors, screenplay: Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
Producers: Harry Davies, Lindsay Poulton, Jim Wilson
Sound: Lars Ginzel, Benjamin Hörbe, Rob Farr
Production companies: The Guardian, JW Films
World Sales: mk2
Venue:  Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Hebrew, English
80 minutes