There is probably no film more sober than “NAZA”. Sober in the sense of the cinematic means with which he presents his outrageous request. It's a film that takes place almost entirely at night. The skyline of Tel Aviv glitters in the background, and there are always two people sitting in the foreground in the dark. One is the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who sometimes gets some light. His changing conversation partners can only be seen as silhouettes in profile.
They are former members of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), data analysts, drone operators and snipers. They talk about how the Gaza war is being fought. Not only are their faces blurred, but also their voices and even their handwriting - anything that could identify them and, as they know only too well, land them in prison for revealing state secrets.
The program of the 83rd Venice Film Festival was, as usual, announced a good month before it began. However, there was a mysterious gap on Thursday, September 10, 2026, a "film to be announced"; When asked, only murmurs of “security reasons” could be heard.
When the mystery was finally solved at the end of August, people weren't much the wiser. It was the new film by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, whose “No Other Land” had won the documentary film award at the Berlinale (and shortly afterwards the Oscar), after which Abraham described the Israeli occupation in the West Bank as “apartheid” in his acceptance speech, which plunged the festival into political controversy and deep crisis.
Abraham's new film had a title that no one could understand - "NAZA" - and that's why it's explained right at the beginning: It's the army's internal term for collateral damage. “4 NAZA,” for example, means that if you attack a Hamas member, you also risk the death of four people around you, i.e. your wife, children, parents, friends.
The IDF knows this in advance because it knows exactly where its enemies live, down to the address and floor. And the army leadership made the fundamental decision not to attack them on the move during the day, but in their homes at night, the film claims. She deduces that her targets are actually there from the signals that their cell phones emit.
If there is any doubt, the family members' phones are tapped; the army is able to activate all functions of a cell phone, access connections, the camera function, stored photos and left messages. Once the Hamas agent is located, the drone with the bomb is sent off. The surveillance – “You feel a bit like God,” says an ex-soldier – enables complete control. The effect of the attack can be easily assessed.
The film claims there are around 40,000 Hamas suspects on the IDF death list. The targets are recommended by the AI, which monitors all cell phones in the Gaza Strip and searches for a “Hamas profile” in their data; An error margin of up to 15 percent is taken into account, says an ex-soldier, i.e. people who end up on the list incorrectly. After the Hamas attack on October 7th, another says, the prevailing view in the army was that there were no innocent people in Gaza.
The algorithm – as the film claims – makes the (pre)decision about life or death. People give the order to attack after the NAZA value has been calculated: How many collateral deaths could an attack cost? There were, say the insiders in Abraham's film, different quotas depending on the importance of the goal; At times, up to 500 uninvolved deaths were expected for a Hamas leader in one attack. And there were not only the targeted killings, but also the intention to destroy the houses of entire neighborhoods in northern Gaza so that no one could return there.
Abraham and Szor's film is not just a series of oppressive statements - although, it should always be remembered, they come from the mouths of former Israeli soldiers. The co-directors have also learned a lot as filmmakers since "No Other Land": There are almost contemplative sequences in "NAZA" in which their camera looks from outside into illuminated Tel Aviv high-rise apartments and - 60 kilometers from the Gaza Strip - captures peaceful everyday scenes, while an ex-sniper talks about how he shot down people who were queuing for food.
Abraham repeatedly asks his interlocutors whether no one has questioned this type of warfare and is always answered: “No, we have only fulfilled our mission.” That can hardly be an answer that people are satisfied with, and for those who have dared to appear in front of the camera, it hasn't remained so.
But the horror that grips the viewer in view of the specific stories goes beyond that, because the witnesses emphasize, on the one hand, that there were no Arab haters in their units and, on the other hand, that they felt something like fun and euphoria when their deadly drones hit. Theoretical fears that video game-like remote warfare has significantly lowered the threshold for dehumanized killing are apparently confirmed in practice.
“Then what am I?”
Abraham also asks the infamous question about an alleged genocide. The answers to this are indirect, suggestive and polemical. One of the soldiers mentions a visit to a concentration camp in Poland and says he still thinks the Nazis are evil, but, "Then what am I?" And in the middle of the stories of the Gaza horror, the directors mount images of the minute's silence in Tel Aviv on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The “NAZA” revelations do not drop like an explosive device out of the blue (pardon the phrase) on an unsuspecting public. The explosiveness of “NAZA” lies primarily in the worldwide attention that the film will generate; Shortly before the end of the festival, many observers see him as the favorite for the Golden Lion, which will be awarded on September 12, 2026 - one is reminded of “The Voice of Hind Rajab”, the winner two years ago. And it comes six weeks before the parliamentary elections in Israel.
Abraham and Szor's film hardly fits into any of the existing genre categories. It is a documentary - but will be attacked as biased because it initially mentions October 7th but does not address Israel's self-defense argument at all. And it is clearly an activist film because it has a clear agenda to end the type of warfare it depicts.
