When “NAZA,” a documentary about the killing of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in Gaza, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last week, the Israeli directors received a 25-minute standing ovation. The film also won the Special Jury Prize.
But in Israel, the film has whipped up a storm of official criticism, as well as pushback from the military, which rarely weighs in on matters of the silver screen. On Monday, the Israeli military chief, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, consulted with top generals about how to respond to the film, saying it is “based on blood libels” and “deliberate distortions of reality.” He said the military would examine possible legal measures against those suspected of disseminating false allegations and of disclosing classified materials.
Israel’s minister of culture, Miki Zohar, went so far as to ask the authorities to examine whether the directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, could be stripped of their Israeli citizenship on grounds of “betraying the state of Israel.”
Representatives for Mr. Abraham and Ms. Szor declined to respond specifically to Mr. Zohar’s accusation and threat. But Mr. Abraham responded to criticism from home in a video statement on Sunday, saying that it was important for Israeli society to learn about the military’s actions in Gaza and that the soldiers had spoken in Hebrew “because they want to reach the Israeli public.”
The 80-minute documentary, co-produced by The Guardian, consists of interviews with 24 people described as Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers who, according to the film’s synopsis, reveal in detail “the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”
The interviewees, who could potentially face legal consequences in Israel and abroad, were not identified.
The Guardian issued a statement on Monday saying that it was “disturbed to see the authoritarian response to ‘NAZA’ in Israel” and that the film was based on more than three years of investigative journalism.
“We will robustly defend NAZA — and the team behind it — from any attacks or attempts at censorship,” the statement added.
Almost three years after the Hamas-led attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the devastating war in Gaza, the reaction in Israel crystallizes the stark contrast between the country’s self-image and how it is increasingly seen from the outside.
The supercharged atmosphere of a political campaign ahead of national elections in October has further fueled the backlash.
Israelis are deeply divided over how to apportion blame for the policy, military and intelligence failures that preceded the attack and the war. But Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7. The militants’ attack killed about 1,200 people in Israel, and about 250 more were taken hostage, according to the Israeli authorities. It was the deadliest day in the country’s history.
Only a small minority of Israelis have protested against the military’s conduct in the war, with most viewing it as a just campaign of self-defense.
Conversely, many abroad view Israel’s counteroffensive as excessive. More than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed, including thousands of children, according to the Gaza health ministry, whose data does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Much of Gaza had been left in ruins, and human rights groups and foreign governments have accused Israel of war crimes.
The domestic furor over the film has erupted though it has not yet been distributed and few in Israel have seen it.
“NAZA” is a Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi, or collateral damage. In the film, it is used to refer to the loosening of targeting constraints that increased the number of uninvolved civilians who could be put at risk by Israeli military attacks in Gaza carried out on the basis of mass surveillance aided by artificial intelligence.
The New York Times reported in December 2024 that on the first day of the war, Israel’s military leadership changed its rules of engagement, granting mid-ranking Israeli officers the authority to strike thousands of military sites and militants, including low-ranking fighters, and risk killing up to 20 civilians in each strike.
The Times investigation found that Israel had severely weakened its system of safeguards meant to protect civilians and adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess the risk of civilian casualties.
In the documentary “NAZA,” one interviewee says that Israel knowingly launched strikes that had killed 20, 30 or even 300 civilians, and that in one case approval was given for a strike that could kill 500.
The Israeli military denied that specific accusation in a social media post, saying that it “never planned, approved or carried out a strike in Gaza in which 500 civilians or anything near that number were anticipated to be killed.” It said it had operated in accordance with international law.
The military, which has viewed only excerpts, excoriated the documentary for showing anonymous testimonies “from individuals whose identity cannot be verified.”
The military and commentators in the news media also faulted the documentary for failing to acknowledge what they said was the strategy of Hamas to embed its fighters and military infrastructure among civilians.
Israeli politicians who oppose the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have also attacked the documentary.
Gadi Eisenkot, a centrist vying for the premiership and a former military chief who lost a son in the fighting in Gaza, said it presented a “distorted” picture and demonstrated “moral blindness” and “detachment from reality.”
“Criticism is legitimate in a democratic society, but there is an abyss between it and smearing the good name of our soldiers in order to reap applause at festivals abroad,” he wrote in a social media post.
Mr. Abraham, for his part, said in his video statement that he hoped the film would be distributed widely in Israel and suggested that those now attacking it should “watch it, first of all.”
The post After Accolades Abroad, an Israeli Documentary Faces a Backlash at Home appeared first on New York Times.
