NAZA opens with a premise that shouldn't be extraordinary: soldiers describing, on camera, what they actually do. What makes it extraordinary is that the Israeli state has responded to this journalism not with refutation but with threats of citizenship revocation, calls for criminal prosecution, and protesters outside the director's parents' house demanding the death penalty. The film's New York premiere on Saturday — one day after Netanyahu addressed the UN a mile away and called Israel's campaign in Gaza the "opposite of genocide" — was not incidental timing. It was the collision of two competing accounts of the same events, held within walking distance of each other. The documentary, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian, draws on testimony from 24 anonymized Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers who describe AI-powered targeting systems used to select Palestinians for airstrikes — strikes conducted primarily at night, in private homes, and documented to kill multiple family members, including children, simultaneously. The film's title is an intelligence acronym for the expected civilian death toll in a given strike, a bureaucratic word for a catastrophic fact. The soldiers are not dissidents performing conscience for the camera. They are describing systems they operated. The adversarial pressure on this film is, in itself, a form of evidence. Netanyahu has compared NAZA to "launching dozens of ballistic missiles" at Israel. Culture minister Miki Zohar has called the film-makers traitors. The IDF's chief of staff has promised to use "every tool at our disposal." What none of these responses have produced is a factual counter-account: no named soldier who disputes the descriptions, no intelligence official who explains the targeting systems differently, no legal argument that the depicted practices comply with international law. The official Israeli response has been entirely directed at the messengers. At the Lincoln Center Q&A, Abraham was precise about the American dimension: "These soldiers are talking about what has been done with the taxpayer money of the people sitting here." That's not rhetoric — the United States provides $3.8 billion annually in military assistance to Israel, and the systems described in the film are products of that alliance. The couple dozen protesters outside, some holding signs about October 7, were raising a legitimate question the film itself addresses. Abraham on Saturday: "It's in the film and it's completely unjustified. But it also cannot justify what you've seen in the film." The journalistic infrastructure behind NAZA is substantial: the film builds on reporting published between 2023 and 2025 across the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call. Anonymous sourcing, Abraham noted, has a long history in investigative journalism precisely because the crimes being documented are ongoing and the sources face genuine danger. "This film could not have been made any other way." The 25-minute standing ovation at Venice — a festival record — and the subsequent Special Jury Prize suggest that international audiences are not experiencing the film as propaganda. The Israeli state's position is that this response is itself evidence of the film's danger, which is a tautological argument that proves nothing. The citizenship revocation threat is the most structurally significant pressure point. Abraham and Szor are two of the four film-makers behind No Other Land, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2025. If Israel strips their citizenship for that film's successor, it sets a precedent in which documentary journalism about state conduct becomes a deportable offense — a policy that would distinguish Israel from the category of liberal democracies it claims membership in. More than 1,500 Israeli film professionals and 43 human rights organizations have defended the pair, as have major international press freedom organizations. NAZA is set for theatrical release in 55 countries next month, followed by a free digital release on the Guardian's website in November. The film's existence is now inseparable from the response it has provoked: every threat, every ministerial statement, every protester truck circling Lincoln Center has become part of the record it is building. Abraham's closing note at the Q&A was not triumphalist — it was a refusal of the frame Netanyahu has constructed. "I don't want to live in a world where rightful empathy to Israeli victims is weaponized by leaders like Netanyahu — cynical people who promise nothing other than perpetual occupation and war." That sentence will not satisfy everyone. It is not designed to.
