NAZA: IDF Veterans Describe the Machine of Gaza's Destruction Onscreen

NAZA, the new documentary from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the two Israeli Oscar-winning filmmakers behind No Other Land, screened at the 64th New York Film Festival and is now playing in limited release.

The film takes its title from a word invented by the Israel Defense Forces. "NAZA" is the lexical equivalent of dehumanization: a term used to identify collateral civilian deaths from an airstrike without having to call them that. It counts human beings without regarding them as people — just numbers, with no distinction of age, gender, or other demographics. When an officer remotely bombs a building suspected to house two Hamas members along with 47 civilians, the review by The Film Stage explains, they do not say "47 civilians." They say "47 NAZA," then pull the trigger.

Abraham and Szor shot the interviews in 2023, across rooftops in the shadows of the Tel Aviv night, with visually obscured subjects: 24 IDF intelligence officers and soldiers who participated on conditions of anonymity. They spoke candidly. Many came forward because they are having second thoughts about the Israeli occupation and suffocation of Gaza. Several describe joining after the October 7 attack to defend their country, and recall how the idea that "there are no innocent people in Gaza" spread like wildfire and rallied them into what they believed was defensive action.

The documentary answers a perplexing contemporary question: how does a military persuade its ethically troubled, AI-assisted remote operators to kill women, children, and other innocents on behalf of the state? The Film Stage's review argues that nationalism and jihadist-style conviction only go so far for those tasked with exacting mass killing — but language can cover up, rewire, or remove the meaning of something in the brain, changing how it sounds and how it feels. Until one's conscience catches up.

Between interviews, cameras capture life in Tel Aviv through apartment windows, construction sites, and traffic-locked roads. Above them, rockets sail through the air and wartime sirens sound off.

The litany of evidence is staggering. The agents explain that one of the main ways the IDF locates targets is an AI program called "Lavender," which finds phones that operate like those of Hamas operatives. Operators fire on those targets regardless of the collateral count — regardless of the NAZA. Drone operators describe strikes with 500 NAZA for one target, with 20 eventually becoming the benchmark. They say at least 15% of Lavender's intelligence inevitably leads them to non-Hamas operatives, such as a bakery owner whose only connection to the group is having Hamas customers in the neighborhood. They admit that the most junior-level operators have been given carte blanche to green-light their own AI-intelligence attacks.

The witnesses describe a doctrine of quantity over quality of strikes. Suspected targets are killed at home to make it easier, knowingly annihilating entire families — mothers, kids, babies — and all the neighbors in a building to kill one man. One man recalls what he says is a common story: dropping bombs on a target with dozens of NAZA present, only to learn afterward that the Hamas operative was not home. They had merely murdered his family and neighbors, with no repercussions. If anything, the strike invites pats on the back.

They also describe below-the-belt moves ordered from up high to disrupt The Hague and reduce or eliminate the international war crimes with which Netanyahu has been charged. Soldiers tell first-person stories of picking off Palestinians with sniper rifles at food distribution sites if malnourished people — fearful they would not get enough food to survive — got out of line. The review invokes the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt witnessed in the Eichmann trial: the soldiers explain that they continue to carry out the killing on behalf of the state because they are just doing their job.

In one of the film's most chilling sequences, an officer explains that he never understood how the Nazis perpetrated such evil against the Jewish people — until he, simply wishing to help his country, found himself a proud cog in a similar machine built to systematically wipe out a civilization and a group. He still thinks Nazis are evil. Now he wonders how he is any different.

The Film Stage names NAZA a Critics' Pick and calls it an urgent, essential film — a living document in conversation with the most pressing issue in the world, and "the new foremost authority on what's happening on a granular, behind-the-scenes level in Israel's crusade against Gaza." The review's closing argument is blunt: it is much harder to question or deny a genocide when the people perpetrating it in real time call it genocide themselves.

For a documentary built entirely on anonymity and shadowed faces, NAZA's lasting force lies in what its witnesses may yet do next — in tribunals, in testimony, or in the court of public opinion.