The most unsettling choice Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor make in NAZA is also one of the simplest: they keep the volume low. Twenty-four Israeli military personnel describe surveillance, target selection, civilian casualty calculations, artificial intelligence systems, destroyed homes and dead families, yet the documentary rarely reaches for the visual or editorial language of outrage. People sit on Tel Aviv rooftops after dark. Their faces disappear into shadow. Cars pass below. Aircraft move overhead. Long pauses remain in the edit.
That restraint changes how the testimony lands. A louder documentary might tell us where to place our anger. NAZA gives the speakers enough space to reveal how thoroughly violence can be absorbed into procedure.
Abraham and Szor, who were among the filmmakers behind No Other Land, build the film around conversations Abraham conducts with Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers whose identities are concealed. Their appearances and voices have been digitally altered, and the arrangement immediately creates a strange visual contradiction. Abraham is partly visible while the people describing military operations resemble dark outlines against the city. The technique protects them, but it also turns them into representatives of a system whose individual components are difficult to see clearly.
The anonymity creates an evidentiary problem too. Viewers cannot independently judge a speaker’s rank, history or exact access to the information being discussed. Israeli military representatives have rejected allegations connected to the film and questioned anonymous testimony while maintaining that strike decisions are made by human personnel and that civilian harm is minimized under military guidelines. NAZA cannot eliminate that challenge through atmosphere. What it can do is make the testimony legible enough for us to understand the process being alleged.
The title supplies the clearest example. “NAZA,” derived from the Hebrew term for collateral damage, refers here to the number of civilians considered acceptable losses alongside a military target. Interviewees describe casualty allowances that can move from relatively small numbers into the hundreds. The figures are horrifying, yet the more revealing detail is the existence of the number itself. Once a family becomes a variable in a targeting calculation, language has already created distance between the person approving an attack and the people inside the building.
That distance keeps appearing in different forms. One speaker describes his role as technical. Others talk about trusting the system. Another compares the work to a video game. One describes carrying out a successful mission as fun. The film leaves these comments largely undecorated, which suits the material. Its editing works by accumulation: the documentary first teaches us the vocabulary, then shows how surveillance feeds targeting, how targeting connects to homes and families, and how individual strikes fit inside a larger destructive apparatus. Each new piece of information changes what the previous one means.
That structure is especially effective when NAZA reaches the surveillance system known as Lavender. The interviewees describe large quantities of phone data being analyzed to identify suspected Hamas operatives, with one account mentioning an error rate of roughly 15 percent. The film then moves from the abstraction of data toward the much more intimate practice called “Where’s Daddy?”, where surveillance allegedly determines when a suspected target has returned home.
One testimony describes monitoring two young sisters in an effort to establish when their father would be present. A strike later kills the girls and other members of the family. The intended target, according to the account, was not there. The technology stops feeling futuristic at that point and becomes painfully ordinary.
The easy interpretation would be that NAZA is warning about artificial intelligence replacing human judgment. The documentary’s testimony describes something harder to dismiss. Humans design the systems, interpret their information, approve targets and carry out attacks. Automation creates distance, but it does not erase responsibility. If anything, the film keeps following the chain until every supposedly technical decision reconnects with a person.
Abraham’s interviewing style helps. He tends to ask for details rather than performances of remorse. The approach can initially seem too restrained, especially when someone describes acts of enormous consequence in an almost professional tone. Yet pressing each person to declare guilt would produce cleaner television and weaker evidence. Several interviewees seem unsettled by what they participated in without fitting comfortably into the role of repentant whistleblower. One reflects on the moral categories through which he has understood historical perpetrators and begins turning that judgment toward himself. Others sound far less reflective. Confession does not automatically create repentance, and speaking does not undo participation.
Szor and Abraham extend that argument visually by turning their cameras away from the interview chairs and toward Tel Aviv. Using distant views into apartment windows, the film watches residents eating, watching television and preparing for bed. A long lens, for readers unfamiliar with the term, allows a camera to observe subjects from far away while visually compressing the distance between them. Here that technique resembles the surveillance methods being described in the interviews.
The reversal is pointed without becoming smug. The residents are not treated as individual villains, and their faces remain hidden. What matters is the physical coexistence of ordinary domestic life and a military apparatus operating roughly 60 kilometers away. People cook dinner while, elsewhere, people are reduced to target probabilities. Traffic, aircraft and the occasional interruption of the city continue beneath the interviews, reminding us that these conversations are happening inside a functioning metropolis. Most of the horror arrives without sonic emphasis.
Later testimonies widen the scale. Interviewees describe areas of northern Gaza as annihilation zones, the destruction of buildings, attacks on civilians crossing invisible military lines and shootings near food distribution areas. The film gradually shifts from the logic of selecting an individual target toward the destruction of physical spaces where civilian life once existed. That escalation explains why the documentary waits so long before entering Gaza directly. For most of its running time, destruction reaches us through voices, diagrams, software, euphemisms and memories. When physical consequence finally occupies the frame, the distance created by all those systems disappears.
NAZA also makes historical connections that require care. Holocaust remembrance, references to Claude Lanzmann and Shoah, archival material concerning Tel Aviv, and accounts of displaced Palestinian communities expand the film’s examination of memory. Direct equivalence between Gaza and the Holocaust would flatten histories that demand specificity. The stronger idea concerns the way societies remember past dehumanization while remaining capable of constructing new moral categories that permit suffering elsewhere.
That question sits inside the film’s form from the beginning. The people on those rooftops are educated, technically skilled and often articulate. Some identify themselves with political positions that they apparently understand as humane. They describe software, protocols and missions with the vocabulary of professional competence. Then someone explains how a child’s phone can help locate her father, and the camera stays still while the system keeps sounding perfectly reasonable, right up until you understand what it has been built to do.
Naza had its world premiere in the main competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 10, 2026. The investigative documentary examines the systems and operations behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians during the ongoing Gaza war.
Where to Watch Naza (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Naza
Distributor: The Guardian, JW Films
Release date: September 10, 2026 (Venice International Film Festival)
Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes
Director: Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
Writers: Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
Producers and Executive Producers: James Wilson, Jonathan Glazer
Cast: Yuval Abraham
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Rachel Szor
The Review
NAZA
NAZA turns investigative testimony into controlled, unsettling cinema. Its greatest strength is the discipline of its form: anonymous rooftop interviews, patient editing, distant surveillance imagery and restrained sound give bureaucratic language enough space to expose its moral consequences. The anonymity of its witnesses inevitably limits what viewers can independently verify, but the film acknowledges that tension rather than hiding it. What remains is a documentary less interested in spectacle than in showing how violence becomes process, vocabulary and routine.
PROS
- Exceptional use of restraint
- Strong cumulative editing
- Surveillance imagery reinforces the argument
- Complex treatment of responsibility
- Clear connection between systems and consequences
CONS
- Anonymous testimony limits verification
- Historical comparisons require careful handling
- Some allegations depend heavily on participant credibility
