I watched “NAZA” while an Israeli drone flew above my head.
I watched the film — a documentary by the Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor that has become the subject of international controversy and attention — on my laptop, sitting inside a building that is somehow still standing in southwest Gaza. To the left of the building is a bombed-out apartment block. In front, a camp for displaced people. Nearby there’s what’s left of a destroyed university, which is now being used as a shelter. Throughout the area, we can hear the sound of the “zannana,” the Israeli surveillance drone that never stops flying above us here in Gaza. We call it “zannana” in Arabic because of the constant sound it makes: zzzzzzz. It watches us. Sometimes it bombs us.
“NAZA” was filmed almost entirely on rooftops in Tel Aviv. Under the cover of night, anonymous Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers sit atop high rises and apartment buildings with Mr. Abraham. They describe how they systematically targeted us, how they dropped bombs on us from offices far from Gaza. The vantage point shook me. Throughout the film, there’s a feeling that they can see everything, while no one can see them.
In Gaza, this is our relationship with the Israeli aircraft that circle our skies. The missiles come from above, but the decision to launch them seems to come from a place we cannot reach. The rooftops where the directors shot these interviews go beyond a simple visual choice. It’s an image of power: The one above watches, while the one below is exposed.
I wanted to see “NAZA” both because of the international acclaim the film has received and also because of the space it gives people who have taken part in the machinery of killing. I’m also a journalist and a filmmaker. When I read about the film’s critical reception, I asked myself, Why are they being given this platform? Was our story so incomplete that we needed the perpetrators to tell us how we were killed?
I watched “NAZA” twice. The Guardian, which co-produced the film, was able to send me a link to watch it here in Gaza. By the time I finished it, I was no longer asking myself whether this film should have been made. For me, the answer is yes. It offered a window into a world I could not reach myself: I can reach the rubble, but the filmmakers who made “NAZA” can reach the person who determines which house can become rubble. I can film an injured child after a bombing. They can question the person who took part in the decision that led to it. The two accounts don’t cancel each other out; one completes the other.
Many of the film’s revelations we already know. We know that Israel is watching us. We know about the use of artificial intelligence in the war; we have read about Lavender, the A.I. system used to target us, and have gathered testimonies from people who were detained or targeted after passing in front of Israeli military cameras believed to use facial recognition.
Yet even knowing what I know, hearing members of elite intelligence units speak about how they surveilled us made me feel like I was suffocating. By their own admission, they track our every movement. Our phones. Our calls. Our messages. Where a person is. When he returns home. In one scene, one of the subjects recounts hacking into a girl’s phone to find out when her father would be home. This intimate information helped determine the moment of a strike. The girl, her family, became numbers in another calculation.
It’s why, as the film went on, I no longer watched “NAZA” as a journalist but as a person trying to survive. Interviewees told Mr. Abraham how the decision to make someone a target is based on probabilities and algorithms — that they’ve knowingly killed people who they knew weren’t taking part in the war solely from inconclusive information taken from their phones. During my work, I have wondered more than once: Should I leave my phone behind? Should I talk about a film idea on WhatsApp? Is it better not to discuss certain ideas with colleagues near our phones? Could an ordinary conversation be interpreted in another way? Then I second-guess myself. Maybe it is better not to hide anything, to keep my phone with me, and for everything I do, to make it clear that I am simply a journalist and a filmmaker.
It is a strange way to live: trying to imagine how you are seen by a person watching you, so that he or she does not decide that you are something else.
As the interviewees told the filmmakers about different strikes they had conducted, my mind returned to what I have survived in these long years. I thought about Nov. 17, 2023, when I was trapped under a building that had been bombed, unable to move. In the rubble alongside me lay the bodies of entire families. “NAZA” is the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage.” Was I NAZA that day, or was I a target? Just nine days earlier, I had suffered a skull fracture while standing under a different building that had been bombed. Two of my children were injured. Were we NAZA that day, too?
The officers and soldiers describe there being rules to the game that only they knew, while we in Gaza guessed where death could find us. It made it feel as if Gaza is a video game. On the screen, the subjects told the filmmakers, they see targets and icons. When the mission is over, the player can get up from his chair. But the person inside the game cannot leave.
During the height of the war, we started to figure out the rules. Once, I was seeking shelter near Salah al-Din Road, a main highway that spans the length of the strip, when shells started falling and quadcopters started shooting near us. Amid the chaos, I saw a man trying to cross the highway crumple over and stop moving. People said he died there. We understood, watching him, that we couldn’t cross that road anymore.
From down below, we could infer many things from what we could see and hear. We could tell if an area had become a no-go zone from the number of quadcopters we saw in the sky, or from the sounds of shelling. We could see when an entire building was destroyed seemingly to kill one person, or an entire area bombed with a single target in mind. We could tell when a bombing was being used to force us to flee.
“NAZA” confirmed what we — the victims who have told the stories from inside the machinery of killing — had long suspected. In one of the most striking scenes in the movie, an interviewee spoke about the authorization for a strike to kill a huge number of civilians: up to 500 people, though he said he didn’t know how many the attack actually killed. (The Israel Defense Forces have denied approving a strike with that number of casualties.)
As I listened, I began to think: Do I know this place? I’ve witnessed so many strikes over the course of the past three years that I’ve lost count — sometimes dozens in a single day. But sometimes memories of a single moment of destruction remain vivid. I immediately thought of one of them.
Early in the war, there was a neighborhood in Shuja’iyya in eastern Gaza where some were saying hundreds of people — others said more than 500 — had been killed. I stumbled there soon after the attacks took place and saw an entire block in one neighborhood flattened, with dust and concrete mangled over bodies. I cannot say for certain that the incident the interviewee referred to took place there. But even the possibility that what I had seen might have been the result of what the man was speaking about on the screen was terrifying.
The Israeli officers in the film describe how the decisions to drop bombs were made; I remember what these places looked like afterward. The truth of the war in Gaza lives between these two realities. “NAZA” does not complete that story. It begins another: Now we must go to the other side of the algorithm that decides our deaths, to every NAZA, and give them back their names, their faces. Their lives. Every NAZA is a story. It’s our responsibility to tell that story, too.
Mohammed Sawwaf is a documentary filmmaker and producer. He is the founder of Alef Multimedia, an independent media company based in Gaza. Most recently, he was a producer of “American Doctor,” a film that follows three American physicians volunteering in Gaza during the height of the humanitarian crisis.
Source photographs by Interim Archives, FPG/Archive Photos and Abid Katib via Getty Images.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Watching ‘NAZA’ Amid the Gazan Rubble appeared first on New York Times.
