“‘No Other Land’ directors return with an even bleaker indictment of the IDF,” read TheWrap’s review of “NAZA,” which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival this month.
Compelling evidence lies at the heart of strong indictments. It’s highly questionable whether Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s film contains the requisite evidence. While the film has yet to be released publicly (and therefore this writer has yet to see it), “[m]uch of the film’s chilling information has already surfaced, among other outlets, in newspapers like The Guardian, which serves as a producer here,” as TheWrap noted.
For a film which levels the extremely grave allegation that Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of civilians in the Gaza Strip was “premeditated, calculated and intentional,” and not the byproduct of a war against Hamas, strong evidence is particularly mandatory.
It was “NAZA” co-director Abraham himself who produced the earlier investigations which appeared in The Guardian and elsewhere. Tellingly, those reports abysmally fail the evidentiary test.
In November 2023, Abraham published a report citing “the Gospel” – an AI system that generates target recommendations, which one of the former officers described as a “mass assassination factory.” But while the tool identifies potential targets, it does not fire the weapon.
Abraham failed to probe what became of the recommendations after they underwent additional levels of human screening.
Later, in April 2024, Abraham wrote about “Lavender,” another AI system that ranks Hamas and Islamic Jihad suspects according to the certainty of information confirming their terror activity. Four unnamed intelligence officers he interviewed charged that the list contained 37,000 names, including insignificant figures of unconfirmed status.
In the same investigation, Abraham’s interviewees cited another system, dubbed “Where’s Daddy?,” which flags terrorists’ presence in homes. Two sources alleged that the system permitted collateral damage of 15 to 20 civilians in the targeting of junior Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives. Hundreds in collateral damage were pre-approved for the targeting of senior terrorists, six interviewees said. Abraham failed to cross-check their accounts against military orders and specific strikes, and did not verify how many of the 37,000 alleged potential targets were eliminated.
Like “The Gospel,” this system identifies targets, and cannot kill them.
West Point’s Lieber Institute confirmed that “Gospel” and “Lavender” are decision-support tools, not autonomous weapons, and that human decision-makers judge proportionality for every strike. In other words, a person assesses whether there is a clear military advantage to be gained by the strike, and approves or nixes the target accordingly.
With just 24 unidentifiable intelligence corps interviewees, many of whom were also featured in Abraham’s previous reports, the “NAZA” source pool is highly limited.
In contrast, in its December 2024 investigation, The New York Times interviewed more than 100 soldiers and officials – including more than 25 in the vetting and strike chain – and reviewed military records and satellite imagery.
It found that on the day of Hamas’ devastating Oct. 7 massacre, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) raised the permitted number of collateral damage in a pre-planned strike from the standing zero to five civilians up to 20. On Nov. 5, 2023, the military reduced the figure to 10, and by late January 2024, required special approval for almost every such strike.
Only for two days shortly after Hamas’ slaughter, the Times reported, was there a ceiling of 500 permitted civilian casualties, per day, and not – as “NAZA” alleges – per strike. In fact, there is no documented strike in which 500 people were killed, and the Israeli military said no such strike was ever planned or approved.
The Times noted a few strikes targeting senior Hamas figures in the war’s first seven weeks which endangered 100 civilians. Thus, according to The Times, the military briefly loosened safeguards, but did not drop them. Abraham relied on far fewer source materials and evidence than The Times – and yet reached far more sweeping conclusions.
Abraham’s August 2025 report alleging that 83% of fatalities were civilians likewise relied on the flimsiest of evidence to achieve the wildest conviction. While the army was able to identify as combatants 17% of all fatalities by name, Abraham’s conclusion that 83% were civilians was completely baseless. The IDF’s incomplete list did not include unidentified fighters.
In no other war zone is an army expected to identify every combatant it killed by name.
While Abraham told Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker that The Guardian verified identities and incidents, his work there completely lacked any identifying information – names, units, dates, locations or victims.
Moreover, according to the IDF, there’s no way that the junior intelligence soldiers appearing in the film would have access to some of the information they claim to possess.
“NAZA” claims to “describe things as they really are.” Based on Abraham’s track record, the film expects a gullible audience to blindly trust but not verify.
Shlomi Ben-Meir is Hebrew editor for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).
The post ‘NAZA’ Claims About IDF Action in Gaza Deserve a Closer Look | Guest Column appeared first on TheWrap.
