With several acclaimed films in limited release at the indie box office, the one getting the most headlines is the documentary with no distributor at all: “NAZA,” the Guardian-produced investigative film that looks into the systems Israel has developed to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza over the past three years.
After premiering exclusively at the IFC Center in New York last weekend, “NAZA” has expanded to 85 theaters in 30 cities across the U.S. and Canada, grossing $298,240 for a per theater average of $3,508. The film’s cume now stands at $504,074.
This is without the marketing campaigns that would come with a theatrical distributor, as awareness of the doc has primarily come through promotion by the theaters screening the film and The Guardian, which produced the film through its documentary label, as well as word-of-mouth and press from the doc’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it received a 24-minute standing ovation and a special jury prize.
This isn’t the first time “NAZA” directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor have gone the self-distribution route. In 2025, they did so with their Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” which they made alongside Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. That project documented the destruction of the West Bank community Masafer Yatta by Israeli soldiers.
In “NAZA,” Abraham interviews 24 members of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in secret on the rooftops of buildings in Tel Aviv. With their identities masked, they outline alleged war crimes committed by the IDF in Gaza in the three years following Hamas’ killing of more than 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023. The film builds upon previous reporting done on the IDF between 2023 and 2025 by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and The Guardian.
The title refers to the IDF’s term given for the estimated number of civilian casualties in a given attack. Any attack that had an estimated civilian casualty count of less than 20 needed no higher approval, though one intelligence officer said he witnessed attacks with NAZA counts as high as 500 being approved. As the doc notes, Israeli attacks have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians.
Other interviewees recounted how snipers would shoot hungry Gazans who stepped out of line while waiting for food distribution and that mobile phone surveillance systems were used to track suspected Hamas members through conversations with their families, which regularly led to the IDF bombing their homes with their wives and children inside.
When asked by Abraham if he believes he participated in a genocide, one IDF member responded “yes.” “We killed those children deliberately,” the member said.
Last month, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to introduce legislation that would strip Israeli citizenship from Abraham and Szor as well as any other filmmaker who “defames IDF soldiers around the world.” The directors have received threats from far-right activists, leading to a letter of support for Abraham and Szor signed by more than 1,500 Israeli filmmakers and calling for an end to an “unprecedented campaign of vilification and incitement.”
“NAZA” has been distributed in 56 countries around the world and reached No. 1 at the box office in Italy with an opening weekend of $1.23 million, topping the Hollywood re-release “Avengers: Endgame Encore.” The Guardian will release the documentary for free online in late November.
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