“NAZA” is a documentary by the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and the filmmaker Rachel Szor, built almost entirely from twenty-four anonymous interviews with people who served in Israeli military or intelligence roles during the Gaza war. The title is shorthand for the Hebrew nezek agavi — “collateral damage,” the phrase used inside Israeli military circles.

The reporting behind it first appeared in +972 and Local Call in late 2023 and April 2024, drawing limited attention. As a film it has become a front-page conflict of its own:

  • It premièred at Venice on September 10 and won a Special Jury Prize; it screened at the New York Film Festival on September 26–27, opens at IFC Center on September 30, and goes wider on October 9.
  • Prime Minister Netanyahu is proposing legislation to “revoke the citizenship of anyone who defames I.D.F. soldiers.”
  • Culture minister Miki Zohar asked Shin Bet to investigate whether the directors received information from Hamas and committed treason; the I.D.F. chief of staff ordered the Military Advocate General to consider prosecuting the filmmakers and participants.
  • Protesters outside Szor’s parents’ house have called for the filmmakers to be executed.
  • Critics in Israel call it a journalistic failure — anonymous sourcing, thin corroboration, insufficient weight given to October 7th and to Hamas’s use of human shields and tunnels. Some of Netanyahu’s own critics have made this argument too.

What the sources describe is a system, not a set of incidents. Alleged Hamas operatives were assigned a NAZA number — how many civilian deaths were acceptable as collateral damage. An A.I. system called Lavender helped select targets from vast data pulled from a territory whose communications Israel fully controls. One interviewee: “You feel a bit like God because you hear everything they say.” Because monitoring children’s phone calls for “Daddy” and “return” proved effective at locating men at home, the tracking protocol acquired the nickname “Where’s Daddy?” (The I.D.F. says it “categorically rejects” the film’s allegations and that strike decisions are made by human personnel only.)

Brody’s argument is about form as much as content. In the articles, sources were the subject; in the film, they become subjects in their own right — speaking, in darkness, on Tel Aviv rooftops, faces and voices altered, their early pride and sense of duty gradually collapsing into horror, regret, and guilt. He sets the film beside Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”: both treat bearing witness as an ethical imperative and dramatic action rather than mere recording, and both use an unfamiliar Hebrew term as their title. The difference is that “NAZA” is about events underway forty miles from where it is filmed. Tel Aviv at night becomes the film’s second subject — windows, televisions, speeches defending the war — a city “haunted by silences.”

The sources’ own summary of the logic is the part that stays: “you end up with all of Gaza,” “we erased history,” “a mass grave.” Brody reads the film’s value as putting viewers face to face with the people who operate such systems — ordinary people doing what the machinery made ordinary.