The Israeli military has vowed to track down soldiers who cooperated with a documentary about the war in Gaza after the film won a special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival last week. That’s the immediate scandal. Beneath it sits the familiar machinery of state power: a military that kills, a political class that defends the killing, and a public argument over who gets to control the story while Palestinians keep burying their dead.
The State’s Monopoly on the Story
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused those behind the film “NAZA” of incitement and antisemitism. Israel’s Culture Minister Miki Zohar went further, calling on Monday for the documentary’s Israeli co-directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, to be stripped of their citizenship. Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, the Israeli military’s chief of general staff, asked military prosecutors to investigate potential leaks in the film. “This is a dangerous attempt to deny us the legitimacy to defend ourselves against the worst of our enemies,” Zamir said.
The film itself focuses on the civilian death toll in the war in Gaza. It was shot on the rooftops of Tel Aviv at night in extreme secrecy over three years and includes testimony from 24 Israeli military insiders, including intelligence officers and soldiers, who describe what they say is the systemic killing of Palestinian civilians. They allege that Israel uses artificial intelligence to identify and bomb potential targets of the militant Hamas group in Gaza, often knowing that many civilians will likely be killed in an attack. The Israeli military has acknowledged using AI to help identify targets but says a human being makes the final decision before a strike is carried out.
That’s the official line: a human signs off, so the machine stays morally clean. The film’s accounts point somewhere less tidy, toward a system that industrializes death and then asks for applause when it calls the process “defense.”
Who Gets to Speak, Who Gets Silenced
The reception in Venice set off a firestorm among Israel’s leading politicians and military officials, many of whom described “NAZA” as anti-Israel and lacking context. They all acknowledged they have not seen the film. Netanyahu, his Cabinet members and also the prime minister’s opponents in next month’s key elections have all lambasted the film, describing it as antisemitic and part of a broader campaign to defame Israel.
“We are fighting global antisemitic incitement,” Netanyahu said on Monday. “When it comes from within us, it’s simply unbearable.” Doron Spielman, a spokesperson for Netanyahu’s office, said Israel denied the film’s allegations and questioned Abraham and Szor’s motivations. “What they wanted was awards from overseas from Israel haters. And they wanted standing applause,” he said, referring to the 25-minute applause viewers in Venice gave the film.
The politicians and generals didn’t need to watch it before condemning it. That part was apparently optional. What mattered was the threat: testimony from insiders, not the approved script. The state can tolerate grief. It hates unauthorized evidence.
The War, the Numbers, the Silence
Many of the film’s central claims had been previously reported, but Israel’s response echoes how officials have reacted in the past to prominent criticism of the country’s conduct — attacking critics, questioning their motives and challenging the credibility of the allegations. The response also reflects the chasm between how the war in Gaza is seen in Israel and how it’s seen internationally. Israelis have largely seen the war as an act of self-defense after Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage — the deadliest day in Israel’s history.
Internationally, the war has drawn widespread condemnation and accusations of war crimes. Nearly three years of war have destroyed most of Gaza and killed at least 73,789 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
That’s the ledger the officials would rather keep offstage. One side counts legitimacy. The other counts bodies. The institutions in between, from military prosecutors to festival juries to election-season politicians, all get to perform outrage while the dead remain the only ones without a press office.
The NGO and Festival Circuit
The film is co-produced by The Guardian and Jonathan Glazer, who was behind the 2023 Oscar-winning “The Zone of Interest.” It is the second documentary from Abraham and Szor. Their previous film, “No Other Land,” won an Oscar in 2025 and chronicled Palestinians in part of the occupied West Bank as they face home demolitions by Israeli troops and attacks by Israeli settlers.
“NAZA” is an acronym used by Israel’s military that means collateral damage. A synopsis from The Guardian says the film “reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” The film is not yet available to audiences, though the filmmakers have said they intend to seek distribution in Israel, Europe and the United States. The Guardian said in a statement: “The testimonies it contains are true and we believe they deserve to be heard. The interviews were given by confidential journalistic sources.”
The festival circuit loves a righteous scandal. It hands out prizes, applause, and a little moral theater, then sends everyone back to the same war machine. Still, the testimony matters because it comes from inside the apparatus, from people who say they saw how the machine works and what it was built to do.
In an interview with journalist Raviv Drucker on Israel’s Channel 13, Abraham said the attacks on him and Szor showed why many of the film’s participants wanted to remain anonymous. Abraham defended the film’s process for verifying the accounts and events described. He also questioned why Israeli journalists had done little to investigate civilian deaths and the military’s rules of engagement during the war. “Many soldiers told me they had been waiting for a chance to talk about this,” he said.
That’s the crack in the wall. Not a reform plan, not a peace process, just soldiers saying they’d been waiting to speak while the state tried to decide whether to punish them for it.
The film hasn’t reached audiences yet. The backlash has. And in that gap, the state’s reflexes are plain enough: deny, threaten, investigate, and call it legitimacy.