September 12, 2026, Bethlehem, Palestine
There is a sentence in NAZA that should haunt anyone who still believes that the killing of civilians in Gaza is merely a regrettable side effect of war: they heard a child crying inside the house and still approved the bombing. They did not act in ignorance. They knew the house was occupied, knew a family was inside, and knew what the strike was likely to mean.
That is the horror at the heart of NAZA, the new documentary by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, produced by The Guardian. The documentary brings together the testimonies of 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers who participated in the machinery of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. They intercepted communications, monitored homes, worked with targeting systems and algorithms, identified targets and authorized attacks. Now they speak about what they did and, crucially, what they knew when they made those decisions.
The documentary premiered in the Competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, where it received a roughly 25-minute standing ovation. But NAZA is not ultimately about the applause it received in Venice. It is about the system that made those decisions possible and the question of who bears responsibility for them.
The Lie Hidden in “Collateral Damage”
In Israeli military terminology, NAZA from the Hebrew nezek agavi (נזק אגבי) means “collateral damage,” referring to civilians expected to be killed during an attack. The bureaucratic language is revealing. A civilian death becomes an anticipated consequence; a family inside a targeted house becomes part of a calculation.
But what is “collateral” about a child whose presence is known before a bomb is dropped? What is accidental about the death of a family whose home has been monitored and whose presence is already part of the intelligence picture?
Bureaucracies often begin by changing the language of violence. A dead child becomes collateral damage; a destroyed home becomes a target; an entire neighborhood can be reduced to an operational objective. Once the vocabulary is sanitized, the violence itself becomes easier to administer.
The testimonies in NAZA reportedly describe homes bombed at night despite the presence of families, houses burned, neighborhoods destroyed while civilians remained, and Palestinians killed at a site where people had gathered for food. One former officer, asked why he had approved the bombing of hundreds of houses, reportedly replied: “You understand that the goal is destruction.”
If destruction is understood as a goal rather than an unintended consequence, then the central question changes. It is no longer simply whether civilians were caught in the crossfire, but whether their deaths were anticipated, accepted and incorporated into the system itself.
When an Algorithm Becomes Part of the Killing
The documentary’s examination of artificial intelligence and automated targeting makes that question even more disturbing. Modern warfare presents technology as the language of precision: more data, faster calculations, fewer errors. But an algorithm does not make killing moral. It can only make the process faster, more scalable and more distant from the person who ultimately dies.
Behind every digital target is a physical house; behind every set of coordinates is a family; behind every entry in a database is a human life that cannot be reduced to metadata.
For Palestinians in Gaza, that distance has been measured in destroyed homes, erased families and neighborhoods buried under rubble. The technology may be new, but the experience is not. Palestinians have spent years describing what happens when military power is combined with surveillance, automation and overwhelming force.
And this is where the language of “collateral damage” becomes most troubling. If decision-makers know that civilians are present and proceed anyway, the issue is not whether they knew. It is why that knowledge did not stop the attack.
Palestinians Did Not Need Israeli Testimony
The attention now surrounding the testimony of Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers should not obscure another fundamental truth: Palestinians have been saying this all along.
Gaza’s journalists documented the destruction while living through it. Doctors described the dead and wounded from overcrowded hospitals. Parents called out the names of their children. Survivors filmed the ruins of their homes. Families buried their dead, while many of those documenting and reporting the devastation were themselves killed.
The truth did not arrive in Venice. It did not emerge for the first time from Israeli intelligence officers. Much of it has been lying beneath the rubble of Gaza, documented by Palestinians who paid an extraordinary price to make the world see it.
Yet the world often listens differently when the same testimony comes from an Israeli soldier. That double standard must be confronted. A Palestinian mother’s testimony does not become credible because an Israeli officer eventually confirms part of it.
Still, the testimonies in NAZA matter for a different reason: they come from inside the machinery of power. They can help illuminate what was known, what was permitted and what was considered acceptable by those operating the system. They do not replace Palestinian testimony; they strengthen the case that Palestinians have been making for years.
Beyond the “Bad Apples”
For decades, Israel has promoted the image of its military as “the most moral army in the world” an institution in which civilian deaths are exceptions, abuses are individual deviations and the system itself remains fundamentally ethical.
NAZA challenges that narrative by asking what happens when the testimony comes from inside the institution.
If officers knew civilians were present and still approved attacks, if automated systems helped determine targets, and if destruction itself could be understood as an objective, then responsibility cannot simply be pushed downward onto individual soldiers. Orders originate somewhere. Policies are formulated somewhere. Targets are approved by someone. Systems are designed and operated by people. And someone ultimately determines what level of civilian death is acceptable.
That is why the question is larger than individual morality. It is a question of institutional accountability.
Why Yuval Abraham Keeps Speaking
Abraham knows the cost of challenging the Israeli consensus. His journalism and filmmaking have drawn international attention to Israel’s conduct in Gaza, the use of technological systems in warfare and the role of major technology companies in supporting the military. His previous documentary, No Other Land, made with Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Recognition did not protect him from hostility and threats. Yet he continued.
With NAZA, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor again turn their cameras toward their own society, its institutions and its army. There is courage in that choice, particularly in a political climate where exposing the realities of Gaza can make Israelis who speak publicly about them targets themselves.
But their work also points to a larger problem. When telling the truth about what is being done to Palestinians becomes dangerous even for Israelis who expose it, the crisis is no longer confined to the battlefield. It extends into the society that must decide what it is willing to hear.
What the Documentary Leaves Behind
The most powerful element of NAZA is the collapse of the distance between knowledge and consequence. Its testimonies raise a question that cannot be answered by pointing to individual mistakes or hiding behind military vocabulary.
For Palestinians, none of this is new. We have described this reality while much of the world debated whether to believe us. What is different now is hearing people who were inside the machinery describe what they saw, what they did and what they knew.
That is also why the documentary is likely to provoke fury from Israel’s political right, from its so-called center and from parts of the Zionist left. It does not merely accuse an external enemy. It forces Israeli society to confront the testimony of its own soldiers and intelligence personnel about the conduct of its institutions in Gaza.
And it leaves us with a question that the language of “collateral damage” can no longer conceal:
If you know a child is inside a house, hear that child crying, and still authorize the bomb, how can that child’s death honestly be called collateral?
The child was not an unforeseen consequence. The family was not an abstraction. Their presence was known before the decision was made.
That is the moral question NAZA places before the world and one that Gaza has been asking for far too long.