Later this month the documentary NAZA, which sets out, according to its official synopsis, to reveal “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza”, will be streamed for free on the internet. The film was greeted with extraordinary acclaim at Venice, winning the Special Jury Prize after a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation. Reviewers called it an “urgent, gut-punch” documentary, a “sickeningly tough film to watch”, and promised its revelations would leave viewers feeling “outrage and disgust”.
It is not difficult to understand why the film provokes such strong emotional reactions. As just one example of the film's devastating allegations, in an interview promoting the film, co-director Yuval Abraham described Israeli intelligence officers listening inside the homes they are monitoring: "They know the house they are bombing is full of children. They can hear babies crying. They still order another strike." Taken at face value, the image is almost unbearably damning: an officer hears babies crying and knowingly orders the attack that will kill them.
There is just one fundamental problem with this description: It is simply wrong.
Intelligence officers are not the ones who actually make the final decision to order airstrikes. Their role is to collect and analyse intelligence used to identify and locate potential targets and assess civilian presence. That information then feeds into operational planning, review and authorisation involving strike planners, operational commanders and Air Force personnel, under substantial legal oversight, with around 100 military lawyers deployed within hours of the October 7 attacks to review proposed strikes for legal compliance. These stages determine whether and how an attack should proceed, including the choice of weapon, timing and precautions. In other words, the intelligence output is not the end of the targeting process – it’s just the first step.
And yet, to anyone unfamiliar with military targeting processes, Abraham’s statement may sound entirely plausible. More importantly, it exemplifies a recurring pattern in his work: a description that contains a kernel of truth and sounds credible to the general public, but upon closer inspection turns out to be yet another blatant distortion engineered for maximum emotional impact. That same pattern runs through much of Abraham's earlier reporting that prepared the ground for NAZA, and reaches its most extreme form in the film itself.
It begins with the film's title. The Guardian, which also served as the film’s producer, described NAZA as an “Israeli military acronym used euphemistically to refer to civilians expected to be killed in a military attack”. Tellingly, it failed to mention that there is a perfectly standard English acronym for such an assessment – CDE, collateral damage estimation – and that it is an established part of Western militaries’ targeting procedures.
For a film aimed primarily at an international audience, that omission is revealing. Rather than use the established English acronym, the filmmakers opted for an unfamiliar Hebrew term that sounds like a fusion of “Nazi” and “Gaza”. Taken together with the Guardian’s description, that choice appears calculated to make a standard assessment process sound peculiarly Israeli and sinister.
This matters all the more because the process the title refers to actually exists to protect civilians, not to target them. Assessing foreseeable civilian harm is a legal obligation under international humanitarian law. According to Sarit Zehavi, a reserve lieutenant colonel who helped develop the IDF’s assessment process, it was designed not merely to calculate casualties, but to reduce them through precautions such as changing weapons, issuing evacuation warnings or cancelling the strike. The filmmakers invert this entirely: a system designed to minimise harm to civilians is portrayed as the epitome of evil – a mechanism for the "calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza".
That inversion rests on the same collapse of distinct stages that underlies Abraham's claim that intelligence officers "order another strike": treating intelligence assessments, such as an initial estimate of potential civilian harm, as if they were final strike decisions. As the filmmakers themselves recently acknowledged, most of their witnesses were intelligence officers "working behind screens" – precisely the people who produce those assessments, not those who make the final decisions. This distinction is central to both the IDF's response and the account of reserve lieutenant colonel Yair Miron, who published a detailed rebuttal of the film's claims based on his own experience of strike discussions during the war. By skipping over the intervening stages, the film turns intelligence gathering into purported evidence of a deliberate decision to kill civilians.
In its October 1 response, the Guardian rejected what it called the IDF’s attempt to portray all the participants as “junior-ranking officers involved only in the early stages of the targeting process”, saying they included people involved in intelligence, operations and final authorisation. Yet its own coverage had repeatedly foregrounded intelligence personnel: for example, its review headline referred to “Israeli intelligence officers”, with the subsequent text describing “disillusioned Israeli intelligence officers and personnel”. Similarly, its interview headline called NAZA a “film about Israeli intelligence”. Notably, as noted above, the filmmakers themselves make a somewhat more careful claim that most – not all – of their witnesses were intelligence officers, implying that some unspecified minority of interviewees served in other military roles.
But the real problem is not how many participants belonged to each unit, but whether those with first-hand knowledge of final strike decisions were the ones who actually supplied the testimony behind the film’s most dramatic allegations: which strikes were approved, on what terms, and with what result. The Guardian avoids addressing this connection, leaving a critical question: were the interviewees really describing decisions in which they had personally participated or which they had witnessed, or were they just repeating hearsay or speculating? A list of credentials spread across 24 participants does not answer that question. Nor does the response address Abraham’s own outrageous claim that intelligence officers “order another strike” – a claim that not only treats intelligence accounts as evidence of final strike decisions, but actually casts the intelligence officers themselves as the people supposedly making those decisions.
The Guardian also says the investigation extended beyond the 24 participants on screen to more than 100 sources, including senior commanders involved in authorising strikes. But this, again, sidesteps the critical question raised by the IDF: were the interviewees positioned to know first-hand what they claimed about final strike decisions?
If an interviewee personally participated in or observed those decisions, 100 additional sources are not what establishes his standing as a first-hand witness. If, on the other hand, he was just repeating hearsay or speculating, then – even if, for argument’s sake, third parties corroborate his claims – presenting him on screen as though he were describing personal experience is highly misleading.
The Guardian then invokes investigations by other news organisations, presenting them as confirmation of the “IDF’s use of AI-driven systems in the Gaza offensive and the loosening of safeguards to protect civilians”. This is another attempt to deflect attention from the substance of the criticism directed at NAZA and the Guardian’s reporting.
First, no one disputes that the IDF used AI-assisted systems – in fact, the IDF itself publicly described their use as early as November 2, 2023. And a close examination of the reports by these other news organisations reveals that, despite apparent similarities in their findings, they differ substantially in both substance and framing from the picture presented by Abraham and NAZA.
For example, the Washington Post report from December 29, 2024, also examines technology used by the IDF to estimate civilian harm, but explicitly describes it as “helping Israel comply with a key tenet of international law”. While its investigation raises valid concerns about the reliability of those estimates and the weakening of safeguards, it recognises the assessment’s protective function – the exact opposite of the inversion discussed earlier, through which NAZA’s creators build a narrative of a system designed to deliberately kill civilians.
The comparison with the New York Times investigation published on Dec. 26, 2024, is even more revealing. For instance, its report also mentions a threshold of 500 civilian casualties, but the meaning attributed to it is fundamentally different. In NAZA, the figure is presented as the expected civilian death toll allegedly authorised for a single strike against one Hamas member. In the Times’ December 2024 investigation, however, it refers to a cumulative daily ceiling on civilian risk across multiple strikes. The difference concerns both the scope of the figure and its meaning – a limit on the aggregate risk permitted over a day versus an anticipated death toll for one attack. Moreover, the IDF categorically denied that any such single strike was ever planned, approved or carried out, and the Guardian's response, while reporting that denial, offers no evidence to the contrary.
The reporting about another widely quoted “20 civilians” threshold also differs in a crucial respect. Abraham and NAZA present it as blanket permission to kill up to 20 civilians when targeting a junior Hamas operative. The Times, by contrast, describes mid-ranking officers being given authority, in the early stages of the war, to decide whether to carry out strikes risking up to 20 civilian deaths. This account is also consistent with how the IDF described the process in its response: the threshold determined the level of command required to authorise a strike; it did not automatically authorise attacks below it. Each proposed strike, the IDF maintains, still required an individual proportionality assessment.
Furthermore, although the New York Times described the initial loosening of safeguards as driven by Israel’s perception of an existential threat in the first days of the war, it also documented a significant tightening of the targeting rules beginning in early November 2023. By late January 2024, officers needed special permission for nearly all such strikes against lower-ranking Hamas operatives who posed no imminent threat, except those targeting the most senior Hamas commanders.
Crucially, even Abraham's own April 2024 Lavender investigation, for all its flaws, similarly acknowledged that the massive bombardment of junior militants and the loosening of safeguards were concentrated in the first weeks of the war, and that by the time of publication the army was "no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes". That temporal qualification appears to be absent from the film, which seems to present these practices as the way the system operated throughout the war.
Paradoxically, as the IDF tightened its safeguards, Abraham’s accusations escalated. His earlier investigations, while describing what his sources regarded as excessive tolerance for civilian casualties, still framed the campaign as aimed at Hamas. By the launch of NAZA, however, the filmmakers were presenting Israel's campaign as a "calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza" – asserting that "the killing itself was the point."
This shift in narrative is telling: it shows that the divergence between the New York Times’ account and NAZA’s goes far beyond individual claims or details; it extends to the fundamental framing of the story as a whole, a difference evident even at the level of the headlines.
The Times’ investigation is titled Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians. It reports that restrictions were relaxed after October 7 because the military leadership believed Israel faced an existential threat, and describes the resulting increase in civilian deaths. But it does not treat the death toll alone as proof of unlawfulness, let alone claim that killing civilians was the objective.
Now compare this with Abraham and Szor’s article promoting their film, titled NAZA: Exposing Israel’s killing machine in Gaza. Its subheadline reads: “Our new film shows how Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians was a calculated and intentional act, through the testimonies of those responsible.”
The difference could hardly be more striking.
Dr Mark Zlochin is a researcher and data analyst
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