I watched the extraordinary new Guardian-produced documentary from Oscar-winning Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor the other night, and I have struggled to stop thinking about it ever since. The film’s title comes from a Hebrew military term for collateral damage, and it consists of eye-opening interviews with two dozen Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers sitting in darkness, often on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, their voices “digitally altered to disguise their identities”.
At one point, Abraham asks one of the soldiers a remarkably blunt question.
“Do you think it’s a genocide?”
“Yes,” the soldier replies. “Completely.”
He points to what he describes as the “intentional” killing of Palestinian civilians, including children.
“We have to describe things as they really are.” That sentence could serve as the film’s subtitle. Because for the past three years, there have in effect been two wars over Gaza: the war itself, and the war over how we are allowed to describe it.
Has Israel been targeting civilian sites – or is Hamas simply using “human shields”?
Were Palestinian children knowingly killed – or is even making that claim anti-Jewish “blood libel”?
Were hungry Palestinians shot while seeking food – or was Hamas responsible for those killings?
Are many of the Palestinian dead really civilians – or are huge numbers of them “terrorists”?
Does the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza invite comparisons to the Holocaust – or is making such a comparison itself evidence of antisemitism?
NAZA matters because, one after another, Israelis who actually participated in the surveillance and killing infrastructure of the Gaza war weigh in on these issues themselves. And what they say is pretty devastating.
I have spent the past few years debating some of Israel’s most committed defenders – on the live stages of Open to Debate in New York and the Munk Debates in Toronto, on cable news, and on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show.
I wish every one of them would sit down and watch all 80 minutes of NAZA. Not because the film contains another argument from me. Because it contains testimony from precisely the side they think they’re on.
The ‘human shields’ defense
Israel and its supporters have repeatedly claimed that Israel is confronted by the “Hamas human shield strategy” in Gaza, in which “Hamas deliberately embeds its fighters within civilian areas”.
In NAZA, Israeli military and intelligence sources undermine that defense. Listen, for example, to the Israeli source in NAZA who unpacks the AI-led strategy to track and then bomb Hamas commanders at night, in their homes, alongside their families. “Hamas uses human shields in some cases but the human shield claim about private houses is absurd. It’s just not true. We bomb them in houses because that’s how we find them,” he said. “They just come home to sleep. That’s where we catch them.”
The civilians were not shielding the target. The target was followed by Israel to the civilians.
The children
Some have claimed that media coverage of Palestinian children killed in Gaza constitutes “blood libel” and stirs ancient images of “the child-killing Jew”.
“Ask how Israel is able to target innocent children with such deadly accuracy and no one can tell you,” the celebrated British novelist Howard Jacobson wrote. “Ask why they would want to target innocent children … and no one can tell you that either.”
NAZA settles the argument: it is not antisemitic blood libel to point out that Israel knowingly killed children in Gaza. One Israeli intelligence source describes being able to hack the phone of a 12-year-old Palestinian girl in order to figure out when her father – the actual target – might return home. At that point, the house could be bombed.
Abraham asks the obvious question. What happens to the 12-year-old girl?
“You hack her phone and then kill her,” comes the reply.
What is perhaps most chilling is not merely the content of the answer but its delivery: calm, matter-of-fact, almost bureaucratic.
Another Israeli interviewee recalls a boy entering a military-controlled zone. “He didn’t do anything,” the soldier says. “They bombed him.”
Then comes one of the most horrifying details in an already horrifying film: according to the soldier, corpses are left to be eaten by dogs.
So perhaps the question is no longer: why would Israeli forces ever kill children? Perhaps the question instead should be: how much Israeli testimony describing the killing of children are we expected to ignore?
The ‘terrorist’ body count
Some military experts are still, after all the slaughter, arguing that Israel achieved a historically low civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in Gaza, while uncritically parroting Israeli claims that more than 24,000 combatants had been killed.
But NAZA raises a rather fundamental question. Who gets counted as a “combatant”?
Israeli soldiers and intelligence officials describe “annihilation zones” in northern Gaza in which Palestinian civilians who crossed invisible boundaries could be killed.
“Anyone who enters the zone needs to die,” one interviewee says the troops were told.
His unit killed 140 unarmed people in such zones. Yet, he says, they were counted as terrorists anyway. “Whoever you decided to kill was considered a terrorist.”
The food lines
When reports emerged of Palestinians being shot around food-distribution sites in 2025, supporters of Israel argued that Hamas did the killing.
If they watched NAZA, however, they would hear Israeli soldiers and intelligence officials breezily describe how Israeli military snipers gunned down hungry and desperate Palestinians who had stepped out of line to swarm the food distribution sites like “ants”.
One interviewee tells Abraham how “three separate teams of soldiers would massacre the population” as they tried to reach the food. They did not mention Hamas.
Comparisons
Supporters of Israel have long balked at comparisons between Israel’s government and the Third Reich. In June 2026, Haviv Rettig Gur, Israeli journalist and Middle East analyst at Bari Weiss’s Free Press, published an essay titled: “Why the Gaza war cannot be compared to the Holocaust”. Gur called the comparison an “inversion so callous it’s hard to believe” and argued that its purpose was specifically “to make the Jews into the Nazis”.
In NAZA, an anguished Israeli soldier tells Abraham that he visited Poland as a school kid, studied the Nazis from a very early age, and wondered how such Germans, the embodiment of “pure evil”, could “live with themselves”.
Now, as an adult and as a veteran of Gaza, he says, “I understand it,” revealing how he and his fellow soldiers blew up homes in the strip and then returned to their university degrees. In a haunting line, he says: “I still see those Nazis as evil, but what does that mean I am?”
Understandably, the comparison triggers particularly sensitive reactions among Israelis, and as Abraham himself emphasized in a recent Haaretz podcast, he isn’t interested in a “simplistic and direct comparison”. Rather, he believes the Holocaust holds universal lessons about how individuals contribute to systems of dehumanization.
“He understood something about being a perpetrator,” Abraham said of the soldier. “When we use the words ‘never again’, part of that is about understanding patterns of dehumanization.”
Is this Israeli veteran really engaged in a bigoted propaganda campaign? Or does he have something to teach us about what happens when an entire people are dehumanized?
The ‘blood libel’
NAZA has provoked incendiary responses from officials in Israel.
Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett denounced the documentary as a “horrific blood libel against our sons and daughters”. Israel’s military chief, Eyal Zamir, invoked the language of “blood libel” too.
Their rhetoric is beyond parody. We have become numb to Israeli officials smearing and dehumanizing Palestinian eyewitnesses. But are we seriously expected to believe that these Israeli military insiders and eyewitnesses are blood-libeling … themselves?
The inconvenient yet undeniable truth for Israel and its apologists is that over the course of less than 90 minutes, 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officials have, wittingly or unwittingly, fully exposed 36 months of baseless propaganda, lazy talking points and disgusting lies.
Don’t take my word for it. Take theirs.
