Yuval Abraham said on Channel 13 on Monday that Israeli media had ignored Gaza civilian deaths for the entire war, as the Israeli state and its media allies scrambled to contain a documentary few people in Israel have actually seen. The film, NAZA, has not yet been made publicly available, but that hasn’t stopped the usual machinery from moving into place: threats of legal action, demands for censorship, and a coordinated official response from government agencies.
The State’s Monopoly on the Story
Abraham, the Israeli co-director, defended the documentary in a tense Hebrew-language interview and said its allegations had been verified. He said the film was made in partnership with The Guardian and that its creators took steps to protect the identities of the soldiers who spoke in it. “This is a Guardian film, made in cooperation with a leading publication, with a staff of editors who had access to the raw materials,” Abraham said. “The identities of the people were verified, the cases they discussed were verified.”
Raviv Drucker, who interviewed Abraham, kept pressing on how Abraham and co-director Rachel Szor could have verified the claims made by 24 anonymous IDF Intelligence Corps soldiers. Drucker is one of the few Israelis to have seen the film in its entirety, since it has not been released publicly. He said he remained skeptical of allegations that the IDF approved strikes it knew would kill hundreds of civilians or approved strikes that would have killed hundreds of civilians who did not heed evacuation warnings, even without a Hamas target. He also said that on multiple occasions, when he reported on soldiers’ testimonies, he found himself unable to verify them or discovered they were inaccurate.
Abraham answered by pointing to what Israeli television has not done. He said the film included the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the mistreatment of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, then challenged Drucker to do more investigative journalism about the war’s civilian toll in the Strip. “Why didn’t you broadcast?” Abraham asked. “Three years in the [Israeli TV news] investigative programs, there wasn’t even one item, if I’m not mistaken, that dealt with the rules of engagement in Gaza, that dealt with the collateral damage policy, that researched in-depth the damage to innocent Palestinians’ lives in the Strip.” He added: “You say [our film] wasn’t complex enough. Okay. So why didn’t you broadcast something complex yourself?”
The Guardian responded on Monday by calling the Israeli government’s reaction to the film “authoritarian,” praising the NAZA directors and pledging to defend the film from “any attacks or attempts at censorship.” Abraham said he hoped the film would be screened in Israel. “That’s the goal. We really want to. We’ll do everything possible so that it’s broadcast as widely as possible in Israel,” he said.
The Security Apparatus Closes Ranks
Abraham and Szor now face threats of legal action in Israel, including a threat to revoke their citizenship, along with condemnation across the political spectrum. Abraham said, “Israel is my home, it’s the place where I want to live, the place that’s so important to me. So of course I’m scared that I won’t be able to return. What will I do here, abroad?” That’s the human cost of the state’s favorite trick: turn a film dispute into a loyalty test, then dress it up as democracy.
Among the film’s allegations is one, featured in a promotional video, that the military planned a strike during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in which 500 civilian deaths had been anticipated. The IDF denied that claim as “completely false.” It said: “The IDF has never planned, approved, or carried out a strike in Gaza in which 500 civilians or anything near that number were anticipated to be killed. Nor was any credible claim raised throughout the war suggesting that an IDF strike had caused anything near that number of fatalities.” The military said Abraham and Szor “couldn’t possibly verify this claim, there is no real supporting evidence, and yet they published it anyway.”
The film’s testimony alleges “mass killing on an industrial scale” in Gaza, with one officer describing an AI-assisted system that identified targets using data gathered from thousands of hacked mobile phones. The IDF said decisions on the selection and approval of strikes were made “by human personnel only… and not by artificial intelligence.” The Jerusalem Post reported that there are highly trained air force operations and legal military officials involved in IDF targeting decisions, despite claims by the NAZA film that the military has given over its discretion to AI. It also reported that the IDF views the astronomical ratios of 100 or 500 civilians per Hamas terrorists as nowhere near reality and says the ratios are much lower.
Earlier on Monday, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir instructed the military’s top legal official to examine legal action against the film and those involved in it, saying it defamed the military, and separately ordered an investigation into the leaking of classified material used in its production. The IDF has not allowed journalists to independently enter Gaza since the start of the war. No independent access. No outside witness. Just the armed institution, its lawyers, and the people trapped under it.
Who Gets to Speak, Who Gets Silenced
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later joined the criticism. “We’re fighting worldwide antisemitic incitement, but when it comes from within us, it’s intolerable,” he said, before trying to draw a correlation between the film and his political rivals Yair Golan and Gadi Eisenkot ahead of next month’s Knesset election. The state’s answer to criticism, as usual, was to widen the circle of enemies and drag electoral theater into the frame.
Former hostage Eliya Cohen posted a video attacking the two Israeli co-directors. Cohen said he recognized that Israel is a democratic country and that the law doesn’t allow them to be arrested for their documentary, but urged the public to hang up signs with the directors’ faces so they’d be forced to walk the streets of Israel “in shame.” He said the pair smeared IDF soldiers who fought to bring him home from captivity. “People need to spit on them in the streets.” Another former hostage, Rom Braslavski, called Abraham and Szor “traitors” who “should be sent to prison.”
More than 700 people in the Israeli film industry signed a petition backing Abraham and Szor and opposing government efforts to silence or outlaw them. The petition said, “We, filmmakers, call upon everyone still fighting for freedom of speech and artistic expression to join in expressing support and solidarity with Rachel Shor and Yuval Abraham, the creators of the film ‘No Other Land,’” referring to the pair’s earlier Oscar-winning film about settler violence and home demolitions targeting Palestinians in the West Bank. It said, “In recent days, we have witnessed an unprecedented campaign of incitement and vitriol against the filmmakers — a campaign that is dangerously close to effectively sanctioning violence against them and threatening their lives.” Among the signatories were “Waltz with Bashir” director Ari Folman, “In Treatment” (BeTipul) director Hagai Levi, “Our Boys” actor Shlomi Elkabetz, “In Treatment” (BeTipul) actress Shira Geffen and award-winning director Nir Bergman.
The signatories also criticized those who had spoken out against NAZA without watching it. “We hope the film is distributed in Israel soon so that everyone can watch it, form their own opinions, and engage in a genuine, long-overdue discussion about the war in Gaza and its consequences — a discussion that, to date, has barely taken place in Israeli media or society,” the petition said. That line says more than the official denials do. A war with no public accounting, a media system that won’t touch the subject, and a state that treats scrutiny as defamation.
Channel 12 reported on Monday that Israeli government agencies, including the Foreign Ministry, had been holding intensive meetings to formulate a response to the film. It said Israeli diplomats abroad were sent talking points to guide their response. According to Channel 12, the main messages were that in vibrant democracies there are always those who publish lies; there is no genocide in Gaza, and anyone who claims there is does not know what the term means; the IDF invests significant resources to minimize harm to civilians; the movie is full of inconsistencies; and the IDF called off hundreds of operations in Gaza out of fear of collateral damage to Palestinian civilians. The talking points read like a familiar state ritual: deny, reframe, circulate, repeat.
The film itself remains unseen by most of the public. The institutions around it, though, are fully visible.