A review and analysis from someone who recently saw NAZA.
Directors Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor could have made a serious documentary about the war in Gaza, civilian casualties, collateral damage calculations, and IDF military practices. These are all legitimate questions to investigate about how the IDF selected targets, assessed civilian casualties, and conducted its military campaign.
Instead, Abraham made a propaganda film with one very clear message: The IDF are literally modern-day Nazis, deliberately carrying out the destruction of the Gazan people.
This is made unmistakably clear in a sequence late in the film. Abraham shows the two-minute siren observed in Israel on Holocaust Remembrance Day, followed by an image of director Claude Lanzmann, whose 1985 documentary Shoah consisted of interviews with witnesses to the Holocaust (which my parents made me watch in a New York City theater when I was 15, and which I remember well). The comparison Abraham is drawing is hardly subtle. Just as Lanzmann interviewed witnesses to Nazi atrocities, Abraham presents himself as interviewing their Israeli counterparts. The implication is that the IDF are today's Nazis and Gaza is the modern Holocaust.
That framing is precisely why NAZA cannot be taken seriously as an objective investigation of the war. Nor can the testimony of Abraham's anonymous witnesses be accepted uncritically. We hear only brief, selectively edited excerpts from each interview. With no way to assess the witnesses' credibility, the full context of their remarks, or what may have been omitted, the audience is left unable to independently evaluate their testimony. Knowing that Abraham was also behind the deliberately misleading claim that 83% of Gazans killed in the war were civilians only adds to the skepticism with which his presentation of evidence should be viewed.
The film is certainly harrowing. The accounts and footage of death and destruction, including descriptions of how Israeli drones killed people from the sky, are deeply disturbing. It is a horrifying reminder of what war looks like, particularly for civilians caught in it, and the film succeeds in unsettling the viewer. But disturbing footage is not itself evidence of genocide, and civilian deaths, however terrible, do not establish that civilians were deliberately targeted or that a military campaign was conducted with genocidal intent.
One of the soldiers interviewed says he believes the war was genocide. But his explanation in the very next sentence reveals he does not understand the term. He specifically acknowledges that civilian deaths were classified as collateral damage, but argues that because the military knew civilians would die, those deaths were intentional killings and therefore constituted genocide. This if of course plainly wrong.
The most glaring problem with NAZA is what Abraham deliberately leaves out: the actual war being fought in Gaza. As usual for this type of narrative, Hamas is 100% erased from the battlefield. Someone emerging from a three-year coma and watching this film would come away believing that the IDF was deployed to Gaza for one purpose alone: to kill Palestinian civilians. They would hardly even know that Hamas had an organized military force, let alone that Israel was fighting a war against it.
There is an early, passing reference to 10/7 and the hostages, but virtually nothing thereafter about the organization Israel was fighting, its military infrastructure, its tactics, or its deliberate integration of military operations into civilian areas. Nothing about Israel's efforts to recover the hostages, ceasefire negotiations, Hamas' refusal to surrender, or the killing of hostages in captivity. I waited throughout the film for someone to mention the word "tunnel." It never came. Nothing about Hamas' role in prolonging the war. In the world Abraham presents where the IDF are Nazis, HAMAS DOES NOT EXIST.
How is it possible to make a documentary about Israeli targeting decisions in Gaza without discussing Hamas' vast underground tunnel network? If the central accusation is that Israel attacked Hamas operatives in their homes, shouldn't the filmmaker at least examine where else Israel could have attacked them? What were the military alternatives? Were those operatives accessible in tunnels? Would attacking the tunnels beneath residential neighborhoods have caused even greater civilian casualties? Why did Hamas commanders have tunnel shafts from their homes and other civilian structures rather than clearly identifiable military installations? Abraham shows no interest in asking any of these questions.
Ironically, the testimony of the Israeli intelligence personnel undermines much of the film's own framing. There is extensive discussion of how intelligence resources were devoted to identifying Hamas targets and calculating anticipated collateral damage. The interviewees describe procedures for estimating how many civilians might be killed in an attack. Whatever one thinks of the resulting decisions, these accounts concern the targeting of Hamas operatives, not a policy of deliberately targeting children or civilians. There is no testimony establishing that civilians in those homes were the intended targets, or that the IDF waited for additional civilians to arrive in order to kill them. The discussion is about attacking Hamas personnel while anticipating that civilians might also be killed.
That raises serious questions about proportionality, intelligence reliability, and the military advantage expected from particular strikes. But Abraham bypasses all those questions in favor of his predetermined conclusion.The intelligence officers also acknowledge another crucial limitation: They were not responsible for the actual decisions to authorize or conduct the strikes. Their role was to provide intelligence about targets and anticipated casualties. They were not privy to the final operational assessments, the expected military advantage, or the circumstances under which an attack was ultimately carried out. This leads to perhaps the film's most consequential evidentiary failure.
At different points, NAZA refers to extraordinary ratios of civilian casualties to a single targeted combatant, including 100-to-1, 300-to-1, 500-to-1. Yet the film does not substantiate them with a single documented strike in which hundreds of civilians were actually killed to eliminate one Hamas operative. There is not a single analysis of an actual strike in the entire film.
The same selective approach appears in the interviews with soldiers discussing the killing of Gazans in restricted military zones or near aid distribution areas. Abraham presents snippets of testimony without pursuing obvious follow-up questions such as: were Hamas fighters ever operating among people seeking aid? (dozens have been identified by Hamas and PIJ's recent martyr notices, so we know this is true). These are precisely the questions that a true investigative journalist should ask before drawing conclusions about what the testimony establishes.
Likewise, the film devotes considerable attention to the destruction of residential buildings, but seemingly none to Hamas' use of booby traps and explosives in homes, or tunnel shafts. Were any of the buildings destroyed because they were booby-trapped? Did the interviewed soldiers know colleagues killed by explosives planted inside residential structures? How often were houses used as military positions, tunnel entrances, or weapons-storage facilities? Again, silence, Hamas does not exist.
At no point does Abraham seriously grapple with the fact that hundreds of Israeli soldiers were killed fighting in Gaza. What were those soldiers fighting, and against whom? Was there an actual battlefield, with armed Hamas units, ambushes, tunnels, explosives, and sustained combat? Of course there was. Again, the movie is intended to portray the war as the IDF vs civilians, period.
The result is a film that asks viewers to judge Israel's conduct in a war while withholding almost everything about the enemy it was fighting. NAZA had the opportunity to investigate the Gaza war and IDF actions. Instead, Abraham chose to make a film equating Israeli soldiers with Nazis, leaving his audience emotionally overwhelmed but remarkably uninformed about the war itself.
NAZA: A Propaganda Film Masquerading as an Investigation of the Gaza War