The new documentary NAZA, directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, presents itself as an exposure of the machinery behind Israeli military operations in Gaza. It is built around anonymous testimony from 24 individuals described by the filmmakers as Israeli military and intelligence insiders-although their anonymity leaves that characterization impossible for the audience to verify independently.
The film portrays Israel’s post-October 7 targeting policies as increasingly willing to accept large numbers of Palestinian Arab civilian casualties. Because its directors are Israelis and its principal witnesses are claimed to be Israelis as well, its accusations carry unusual authority. Opponents of Israel can now say that “even Israelis admit what Israel has done."
That is precisely why NAZA deserves scrutiny-not only for what it shows, but especially for what it leaves out.
Its most important omission concerns one of the great paradoxes of preventive warfare. A documentary can show the people who died because military action was taken. It cannot show the people still alive because that action prevented a future attack. Palestinian civilians killed in an Israeli strike are visible: their photographs can be shown, their families interviewed, and their homes filmed in ruins. But if that strike also eliminates a Hamas commander preparing another attack, the Israelis who might otherwise have died never become victims. They have no graves, no funerals and no massacre footage because the massacre was not allowed to happen.
The more successful prevention becomes, the easier it can be afterward to question whether it was necessary. The current confrontation with Iran’s nuclear program illustrates the paradox. The costs of military action are immediate and visible: billions of dollars in expenditures, depleted munitions, disrupted oil supplies, higher fuel prices, and the danger of a wider regional war.
The potential benefit is harder to see. If military action significantly delays Iran’s ability to acquire a nuclear weapon and thereby prevents a future nuclear crisis or catastrophe, there will be no photographs of the cities that were not destroyed or the civilians who were never killed. The costs of prevention become historical facts; its greatest benefits remain counterfactuals.
The same distortion applies in Gaza. Palestinian Arab casualties from an Israeli strike are visible and countable. Israelis who may remain alive because a Hamas commander, weapons system, tunnel network, or planned attack was eliminated never appear on the other side of the ledger. Their absence from the casualty statistics may itself be partly the result of the action now being condemned.
This goes directly to the way NAZA constructs its moral case. A commander who before October 7 might have declined to strike a Hamas operative because civilians were nearby could rationally reach a different conclusion afterward: if this person remains operational, will Israelis die because we failed to act? That does not make every strike legal, wise, or proportional. But it does mean that a change in targeting policy after October 7 cannot simply be interpreted as evidence that Israel stopped caring about civilian life.
October 7 changed the meaning of risk. It is not background scenery to the Gaza war; it is the reason the war happened. Hamas and other armed Palestinian Arab groups entered Israeli communities, murdered civilians, kidnapped hostages, and demonstrated that Israel’s previous security assumptions had failed catastrophically. Israeli commanders were no longer dealing with a theoretical adversary. They were dealing with an organization that had demonstrated both the willingness and the ability to massacre Israeli civilians.
Any serious examination of Israel’s subsequent decisions therefore has to ask not only how many Palestinian Arab civilians might be endangered by a strike, but what threat the target represented, what might happen if that target survived, and what risks would then be transferred to Israeli civilians and soldiers. NAZA, however, is far more interested in the first half of that equation than the second.
A number such as “20 anticipated civilian casualties" sounds horrifying in isolation. But 20 casualties in an attack against whom? A low-level operative? A rocket engineer? A battalion commander? A senior Hamas planner organizing another major attack? Without knowing the importance of the target, the danger of allowing that person to survive, and the alternatives available, the number alone tells us little about whether the decision was militarily or legally justified.
One of the film’s most sensational allegations is that approval was given in one case to accept as many as 500 expected civilian deaths to kill a Hamas member. The IDF rejects the allegation. Because the source is anonymous, the public cannot independently determine who made the claim, what position the person held, what information was available, or whether the statement described an official decision, an informal discussion or a personal interpretation.
That leads to another central problem: who exactly are the 24 people upon whom so much of the film rests?
The filmmakers protect their identities, perhaps understandably if the witnesses face professional or legal consequences. But anonymity also prevents the audience from evaluating their rank, authority, access to information, ideological background, or representativeness. More revealingly, The Guardian’s own interview with Abraham and Szor acknowledged that almost all came from the same educated, liberal, middle-class Tel Aviv environment as the filmmakers themselves-people from similar neighborhoods, with similar interests and likely overlapping social circles. The Guardian summarized the relationship bluntly: “these are Szor and Abraham’s people."
That does not make their testimony false. But it raises two obvious questions: how were these 24 people found, and where are the witnesses from the other side?
A serious inquiry does not become persuasive merely because several witnesses repeat the same accusation. Their knowledge, credibility and possible biases must be tested, and contrary witnesses must be heard. A fair trial would not allow the prosecution to call 24 anonymous witnesses, present their interpretation and then close the case without hearing people who challenge their facts, dispute their conclusions or explain the same events differently.
Yet NAZA provides no comparable group of officers, intelligence personnel or military lawyers explaining why targeting standards changed after October 7, what threats particular targets represented, what intelligence existed or how commanders balanced danger to Israeli civilians and soldiers against anticipated Palestinian Arab civilian harm.
Were such witnesses interviewed and omitted? Were they never sought? Were the 24 drawn from previous journalistic contacts, political acquaintances or a much larger pool? We do not know. But the final film presents one side of a contested military and moral argument without giving the audience an equivalent opportunity to test it. That is not how evidence is evaluated. It is how a case is constructed.
The filmmakers’ prior record is therefore relevant-not because political beliefs disqualify anyone from making a documentary, but because those beliefs help explain the lens through which facts are selected and interpreted. Abraham and Szor were already known for No Other Land, centered on Palestinian Arab suffering, Israeli military actions, and settler conduct in the 'West Bank'. Abraham’s reporting has long focused on 'occupation', Israeli military power, and what he describes as systems of oppression. In discussing NAZA, he has described Israel as having “Jewish-Israeli supremacy as its founding characteristic" and drawn comparisons between contemporary Israeli conduct and historical patterns of dehumanization.
The two are entitled to those views. But audiences are equally entitled to know that NAZA did not emerge from politically detached filmmakers who unexpectedly encountered troubling evidence and reluctantly followed it. It fits a longstanding ideological and journalistic framework. Even before audiences had seen the film, The Guardian, which produced it, described NAZA as exposing Israel’s “calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians." That is not neutral language announcing an inquiry. It is already a conclusion.
The distinction matters. Saying that Israel knowingly conducted attacks in which civilians were expected to die is not the same as saying Israel engaged in the calculated mass killing of civilians. The first may describe tragic but sometimes lawful consequences of warfare; the second implies that civilians themselves were the intended object of the operation.
International humanitarian law does not make every civilian death a war crime, nor does it require a military to leave an enemy commander untouched simply because he operates near civilians. If that were the rule, any terrorist organization could obtain practical immunity by surrounding its commanders and weapons with civilians. The willingness to endanger one’s own population would become a military advantage.
Hamas has fought from within a dense civilian environment, using extensive tunnels and civilian areas as part of its military infrastructure. The consequences for Palestinian Arab civilians have been horrific, but that reality cannot be erased from an analysis of Israeli decisions. Showing civilian casualties without giving comparable weight to the military environment producing those decisions creates an incomplete picture.
The same applies to Israeli soldiers. If an enemy position can be destroyed from the air but entering it would expose infantry to booby traps, ambushes, or tunnel attacks, commanders must consider the lives of their own troops. Israeli soldiers are not expendable abstractions. Their government has a legitimate duty to protect them while carrying out military operations.
None of this means every Israeli strike should be defended. Mistakes should be investigated, unlawful conduct punished and individual decisions questioned. But there is a fundamental difference between investigating specific operations and treating the relaxation of targeting rules after October 7 as evidence of systemic criminality.
That is where NAZA becomes most problematic. Its filmmakers appear to begin from a worldview in which Israeli military power is understood primarily through oppression, occupation, and dehumanization. They then present testimony from people drawn largely from their own social environment; emphasize statements supporting that interpretation and give much less attention to the consequences of Israeli inaction. The result is not necessarily fabrication. It is something subtler: selective truth arranged into an ideological narrative.
A documentary does not have to invent facts to distort reality. It can show true things while excluding other truths necessary to understand them.
The resulting damage extends far beyond the film. Because its filmmakers and witnesses are Israeli, NAZA will inevitably be presented as an Israeli confession. Anonymous testimony becomes “Israeli evidence." Disputed allegations become “admissions." Complex proportionality decisions become proof that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. People who have never reviewed an IDF targeting file can cite the documentary itself as evidence of genocide.
Its creators must have understood that their Israeli identities would magnify the force of their accusation. Abraham’s own language after the film’s success makes his conclusion clear. After NAZA received the Special Jury Prize at Venice, he said Israelis should watch it because “it’s our country that is doing these crimes." That is not the language of someone presenting an unresolved question. It is the language of a prosecutor convinced that the verdict has already been reached.
And that leads to the central criticism of NAZA. The film asks how Israel could knowingly conduct operations that endangered Palestinian Arab civilians. But it gives far less weight to the opposite question: what was Israel supposed to do after an enemy had demonstrated that it could penetrate Israeli communities, massacre civilians, seize hostages, operate from within a civilian population, and continue preparing future attacks?
A country that refuses to strike whenever civilians are nearby teaches its enemy how to obtain immunity. A country that accepts unlimited civilian casualties abandons its moral obligations. Military command lies between those extremes.
There can and should be debate about where Israel drew that line. But increasing military aggressiveness after October 7 does not by itself prove moral degeneration. It may also reflect the recognition, purchased at enormous cost, that Israel’s previous assumptions about deterrence and risk had failed.
The people NAZA cannot put on screen are the Israelis who did not die because Hamas commanders were eliminated, weapons destroyed, tunnels uncovered, and planned attacks disrupted. They are invisible precisely because prevention succeeded.
A fair account would place those invisible lives into the moral equation alongside the visible Palestinian dead. It would examine the consequences of Israeli restraint as seriously as the consequences of Israeli action, investigate Hamas’s strategy with the same intensity applied to Israeli targeting, and distinguish civilian casualties, disproportionate attacks, deliberate killing, and genocide.
NAZA does not do that. Instead, it places Israel in the dock, presents the case for the prosecution, and leaves much of the defense outside the courtroom.
That may make powerful cinema. It does not make a complete account of the war.
Avinoam “Avi" Perry, Ph.D., is an author, engineer, researcher, and former technology executive whose career has spanned academia, Bell Labs, telecommunications R&D, international standards, and advanced defense-related analytical work. He served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Six-Day War. His books include 72 Virgins, a thriller dealing with terrorism, extremism, and the Israeli experience; The Winner’s Playbook; AI Playbook for Solution Architects; and Principles of Voice Quality in Wireless Networks, all listed on Amazon. He has written hundreds of op-ed articles on Israel, terrorism, technology, business, and public affairs and also created the Perry Conjugate Gradient algorithm, a widely cited optimization method that has been extended and applied in areas including MRI Scanners, signal processing, neural networks, AI systems including machine learning and training, Radar and Missile defense systems, telecommunications, finance, and other large-scale computational problems.