Why a film on the Gaza War is sparking a backlash
Dina Kraft — September 14, 2026
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
“I have not yet seen the film NAZA,” says Nitzan Shapira, military correspondent for Israel’s Channel 12, before listing the reasons he finds the premise of the documentary a lie: namely, his claim that the IDF does not intentionally kill innocent Palestinian civilians.
“The army does not deliberately attack those who are not involved; anyone who says otherwise is lying,” he says in a social media video post.
His words are a refrain heard across the Israeli political and media ecosystem in the last two days since the Israeli-made documentary not only won a special jurors’ prize at the prestigious Venice Film Festival and garnered the longest standing ovation in its history. It also set off a firestorm of backlash within Israel.
Israel’s culture minister has called for Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli journalist duo who made the film, to have their citizenship revoked. And the IDF Chief of Staff has declared it a “blood libel” and an “attack on the State of Israel” and has asked the military’s top lawyer to look into pursuing legal action against the filmmakers. Haaretz reports that the foreign ministry fears the IDF might have a difficult time refuting some of the allegations made in it.
At issue is a documentary made by two Israelis and based on nighttime rooftop interviews of 24 fellow Israelis, filmed in shadows to maintain secrecy and conceal their identities.
All 24 are so-called whistle-blowers, identified as military and intelligence personnel with knowledge of Israeli Defense Forces AI-powered targeting systems. They say the systems have permitted the army not only to identify Hamas operatives but also to know if their families are with them, leading the military to kill the militants regardless of whether family members are nearby, resulting in the widespread “collateral damage” for which the film is named.
NAZA is a Hebrew acronym for “nezek agavi,” collateral damage.
“The Israeli intelligence officers we spoke with talked to us (about) how this mass killing is systemic: not by accident, but by design, actions of murder and policies that are based on the total dehumanization of Palestinians,” Abraham told the festival audience.
The army previously has said that the interviews remove from context conventional wartime considerations of proportionality, in which the value of a target is weighed against the civilian deaths a strike may cause.
The collective Israeli outrage at the film – which is unlikely to ever get a viewing in Israel, despite pleas by the filmmakers themselves for its airing – largely centers on whether it is slandering all IDF soldiers and the audacity of this pair airing Israel’s “dirty laundry” abroad – a move that some say hands ammunition to antisemites.
It is quickly emerging as a new campaign issue as well, with some on Israeli social media saying Monday that this is another reason not to vote for left-wing parties.
The film’s critics said it unfairly casts necessary and conventional wartime considerations as sinister.
“There is no magic button that can destroy Hamas, or any terrorist organization hiding behind civilians, without harming a single civilian,” Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister who now co-leads the opposition “Together” alliance, wrote on X. “It simply does not exist. In interviews with the international media, I always ask: ‘What would you do?’ They never have an answer.”
Amit Segal, a Channel 12 journalist and commentator known in Israel for being close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayahu, called the documentary “Hague bait,” referring to the international courts in the Netherlands capital, in a long missive on X.
“AI in military applications is naturally unsettling to many, but let us be clear about what it is,” he said. “A tool, one that has existed in earlier forms for nearly 20 years and is integrated into every modern military, and, in targeting and tracking, one that saves lives and improves military effectiveness. In the right hands, better data means fewer civilian casualties and more Hamas ones.”
Haaretz on Monday editorialized that such objections were disingenuous – and beside the point.
“They tried to air the dirty laundry at home, but (were) met with indifference,” the left-leaning paper said. “And anyone who thought the world needed Szor and Abraham to know that the rampant killing in Gaza is unnecessary and immoral is also deluding themselves. Israel's problem is not public relations, but reality. By screening their film at the Venice Film Festival, Abraham and Szor are trying to force Israelis to confront what they already know: that there's a black stain on the way Israel is conducting war in Gaza, to put it mildly.”
As Israel approaches the third anniversary of the massacre of October 7, 2023 Hamas led attacks, the trauma still feels fresh. It's common discourse to still hear the line “there are no innocents in Gaza.” It’s a sentence that has become a shield for many against any kind of introspection or sense of responsibility for the massive death figures – over 70,000 Gazans reportedly killed in the war, both militants and civilians.
Adding to the sting for Israelis is that it is fellow citizens making the allegations. A “people’s army” contemplating accusations of war crimes means taking personal responsibility, not just collective responsibility. The army is one’s own son or daughter, niece or nephew.
Shifting from the role of victim to that of aggressor in the context of the war that followed October 7 remains unfathomable for many. Israelis knew and felt danger in the most primal of ways that day – the slaughter, the rape and the abductions. And it is true that Hamas does hide behind and within civilians. Raviv Drucker, a leading investigative Israeli journalist, argues in his response, after actually having seen the film, and urging others to see it as well, that broader context and verifiable details were, in his opinion, lacking.
The question now is whether the film, or rather discourse around it, may lead to examination of the war that was and is being fought. What lines, for example, were crossed in the name of defense, especially when the sentiment of revenge has arguably been woven into some of the war cries, and not just by far-right Cabinet members.
A young Israeli woman named Yaara Better Pocker, a writer and content creator, posted a video on social media where she interrogates this moment, asking her fellow Israelis: “What are you saying?… There’s so much rage and venom this movie evokes in people before they have seen even a single frame and in the same breath say, ‘Yes, we needed to flatten Gaza and kill everyone, but no, it’s not okay to make this movie.’”
In a reminder of Israeli and Palestinian shared humanity that is so easily lost, most of all during wartime, she leans into the camera and concludes: “Even in a justified war, it’s dead ultimately share the same grave.”
Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She is a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine, and was formerly the opinion editor of Haaretz English.
