1,500 Sign Petition Defending 'NAZA' Directors — SkimNews
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- 'NAZA' co-directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor faced what the petition calls 'an unprecedented campaign of incitement and instigation' after their Gaza documentary won the special jury prize at Venice Film Festival and received a record-breaking 24.5-minute standing ovation.
- Over 1,500 industry signatories — including Israeli filmmakers Ari Folman, Nadav Lapid, Orna Ben-Dor Niv, Hagai Levi, and Shlomi Elkabetz — signed a petition warning that 'the distance between [incitement] and physical threat to their lives is shrinking.'
- Culture Minister Miki Zohar threatened to revoke the Israeli citizenship of both co-directors following the Venice premiere; the directors had said at Venice they intend to return to Israel regardless, stating 'Our lives are there, our families are there.'
- IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir instructed the military's top legal official to examine legal action against the film, claiming it 'defamed the military' — a separate legal front from Zohar's political threat.
- The 'NAZA' documentary, shot in secrecy on Tel Aviv rooftops, features 24 interviews with Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers and alleges the IDF used artificial intelligence to identify Hamas targets and bomb homes knowing families were inside; an anonymous Israeli military official denied the allegations to the Associated Press.
Why it matters: The Israeli state is moving against the 'NAZA' filmmakers on two distinct tracks — Culture Minister Zohar's citizenship revocation threat and IDF Chief Zamir's military defamation legal review — creating dual mechanisms of state retaliation against a documentary built on 24 named military source interviews. The petition's explicit warning that physical threats are closing in on the directors escalates this beyond a standard press-freedom dispute.
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