If this review questions some of the rigour and reasoning behind the most applauded and contested documentary of the year, which was given a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, it is not intended to diminish the depth and scale of suffering in Gaza.
Co-directed by Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor – two of the four co-directors of the Oscar-winning No Other Land – the film ends with an image that can never be forgotten; a line of several pairs of feet, small enough to belong to children, under a collapsed concrete building, their bodies apparently crushed while lying in bed. A father visibly loses his sanity as his hands scrape at rubble.
It is an image that speaks to much of the testimony given by 24 silhouetted, anonymised Israeli military intelligence officers interviewed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops by Abraham. Most specifically it speaks to a policy, as described by the interviewees, of targeting Hamas in their homes. The chances of a successful hit are greater there, it is explained.
NAZA, the film’s title, is an acronym used by the Israeli military when referring to the number or potential number of civilian casualties resulting directly from Israeli fire, more commonly known by the euphemism “collateral damage”.
A picture builds of the methods used to call in strikes. Mobile phone surveillance and sometimes AI techniques are used to identify potential targets. Calls are intercepted. If phrases such as “Daddy is home” are heard, a strike is green lit, “Daddy” being the Hamas target. Interviewees, all of whom work remotely behind screens in military intelligence buildings in Tel Aviv, are sometime asked to augment their testimony with a black Sharpie on white paper.
The sketches illustrate techniques used for destroying buildings or the way intelligence gathering – artificial or not – reveals the position of people within blocks or neighbourhoods.
Early in the film, whose executive producer is Jonathan Glazer, director of the Auschwitz-set Zone of Interest for which he won an Oscar, interviews are paused as an air-raid siren sounds. It is followed by the thunder of an explosion. This, along with reference to the October 7 massacre, are among the very few moments that Hamas’s actions are recognised.
There will be those who complain that this is not even-handed. But a documentary need not always tell two sides of a story. Its duty is primarily to tell its chosen story accurately. Others can tell different perspectives in different films. As for the charge that anonymous witnesses are untrustworthy, well the trust has to be with the storyteller. And anonymity is just often how evidence of criminality is compiled. One of the most disturbing claims here, vigorously denied by the IDF, is that a Naza figure of 500 was accepted in order to kill one individual.
Some cross referencing might have been useful for this assertion, such as a date or a second source. The IDF have said that no single Israeli strike in Gaza has approached 500 civilian deaths. But even then one can argue that if a witness is credible enough and the testimony is important enough, then go with it. And they do.
However, trust begins to seriously erode with the beautifully photographed cutaways from the almost whispered rooftop interviews. Here the camera roves voyeuristically across the windows of high-rise apartments, pausing on the evening rituals of Tel Aviv residents.
Some exercise, others watch TV. It happens to be Yom HaShoah and Claude Lanzmann’s landmark marathon testimony film Shoah is being watched on one of the TVs. As we look through more windows – a rave here, someone on a treadmill there – Glazer’s influence can be heard with a foreboding guttural soundscape rather like the acoustic horror of the brilliant Zone of Interest, whose unblinking gaze observed the banal domesticity of Rudolph Höss’s house with the camp commandant’s home and garden abutting industrialised murder.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that is surely being served up on a platter: Gaza is Auschwitz and Tel Aviv, and its residents who are serenely going about their business not 50 miles down the coast, is the house of Rudolph Höss. This surely is a terrible and terrifying thing to suggest of a city and its people. But this is what happens when artists and activists do the work of objective journalists.
The ovations and awards will keep coming. And certainly it raises questions about proportionality and the use of AI in warfare, but the film devalues and debases itself by equating the Holocaust to Gaza, a suggestion that is not only hyperbole, but a calumny.
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