Israel’s Culture Minister Miki Zohar vowed Sunday to “act to revoke” the Israeli citizenship of filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. The statement comes after Abraham and Szor’s documentary “NAZA,” which interviews Israel Defense Force soldiers about the ongoing killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, won the special jury prize at Venice Film Festival.
“The win of the vile film ‘NAZA’ at the Venice Film Festival is shocking,” Zohar wrote in a social media post on X. “The self-loathing that burns in the creators, who are willing to harm their homeland just to get applause from antisemites around the world, is inconceivable and constitutes a betrayal of the state. This is exactly the reason I led the important reform in cinema so that Israeli citizens will no longer have to pay from their own pockets for the harm to IDF soldiers and the State of Israel.
“As Minister of Culture, I will act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for betraying the state,” Zohar’s statement ends. The post, originally written in Hebrew, has been translated by TheWrap using X’s built-in translation tool.
“NAZA” investigates the ongoing Gaza war, taking its title from a military acronym used by the IDF to measure the number of civilians expected to be killed as collateral damage in an airstrike. The feature reunites Israeli filmmakers Abraham and Szor, whose prior doc “No Other Land” tracked settler violence in the occupied West Bank and won the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2025.
Abraham and Szor’s “No Other Land” co-directors, Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, shared that they had encounters with IDF forces after winning the award. In March 2025, Bassal was assaulted by Israeli settlers and detained at an IDF base, saying soldiers had beaten him during his detention. In September 2025, Adra’s residence was reported to be searched by Israeli authorities after a group of Israeli settlers attacked him.
“NAZA” features testimony from anonymous Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers, including one subject that states that the IDF approved an airstrike that could kill 500 Palestinians. The IDF has denied the claim.
In TheWrap’s review of “NAZA,” contributor Ben Croll wrote that the documentary “works backward from Gaza’s current state, asking how the death toll, now estimated above 70,000, got so high.”
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