IDF Soldiers Detail Gaza Strikes in 'NAZA' Doc — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two members of the team behind the 2024 Oscar-winning doc "No Other Land," directed "NAZA," which consists of late-night rooftop interviews in Tel Aviv with 24 anonymous IDF soldiers whose voices and faces are digitally altered.
- The film details Israel's Lavender AI program and remotely controlled drone strikes, putting Gaza casualties at 73,000, with soldiers admitting operations include hacking a 12-year-old girl's phone and listening for "Daddy's home" to strike returning targets.
- A soldier's quoted belief — "After October 7th, there are no innocent people in Gaza" — anchors the film's explanation of "NAZA" as military shorthand (Hebrew "nezek agavi") for collateral damage; one strike knowingly produced 500 NAZA with commanders signing off.
- The documentary includes an archival 1980s clip of Benjamin Netanyahu defining terrorism as "the deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends," presented near the end without additional comment.
- The Guardian is co-sponsoring the film's release and will make it available free on its site later this year, while some critics have accused the filmmakers of propaganda and even treason — with citizenship revocation reportedly on the table.
- The film breaks its interview-only template only at the very end, showing footage of legs protruding from a collapsed structure and a sobbing father searching for survivors — the sole moment it asks the audience to witness rather than just listen.
Why it matters: The film transforms prior investigative reporting about Israel's Lavender AI and mass-casualty strike authorizations into anonymous perpetrator testimony, putting voices on record behind Gaza casualty figures that prior reporting could only attribute in the abstract. The Guardian's co-sponsorship puts that testimony directly in front of mainstream Western audiences at a moment when Netanyahu's government is facing renewed international legal scrutiny.
Ask SkimNews
