Steve Apfel is a veteran authority on Israel bashing. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007PIVM6G?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
For Avraham and Szor stardom beckoned. Unless their film conveyed a Gaza trampled by Gestapo Zionists, they’d have to kiss goodbye to number one pride of place at the Venice festival. And they knew the formula that the judges at the glitzy woke event could not resist.
“Somebody must have slandered Joseph K, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. The inspector does not know what the charges are but tells K. that he is free to continue living his life as usual".
The gripping opening paragraph comes from The Trial by Franz Kafka. There’s bound to be a tagline concept in it for the documentary NAZA, Hebrew for collateral damage and jargon for “injury inflicted on something other than an intended target, specifically the civilian casualties of a military operation."
The movie premiered at the September 2026 Venice International Film Festival and walked off with a Special Jury Prize. The uproar over the film and its creators, Israelis Yuval Avraham and Rachel Szor, was immediate and is ongoing.
Their film apparently works backwards from Gaza in June 2026 and asks how the final death toll of 73,000 “got so high". That’s an easy one.
The budding Oscar directors got the toll from AP which got the toll from the Gaza Health Ministry. Only it’s not. Hamas runs Gaza; therefore it’s the Hamas Ministry of Health.
It’s not for nothing that counts of Palestinian Arab deaths became such a hot potato. Reacting to the film Israeli premier Netanyahu said that,
“We think that every civilian death is a tragedy. For Hamas, every civilian death is a strategy. The Israeli army is doing something that no other army has done in history, and will continue to do that".
Two military experts and a statistical analysis in a class of its own have his back. Retired General Richard Kemp argues that the civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in the Gaza conflict is 2:1 which is uniquely low in the history of modern urban warfare. John Spencer, a world expert on urban warfare is of Kemp’s persuasion.
To clinch the argument a definitive study by the Henry Jackson Society says it all: Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza.
“The Ministry of Health is under the full control of Hamas. It was established by Hamas in 2007 after it took full control of the Gaza Strip. Given that Hamas is a direct party to the conflict this creates an obvious conflict of interest".
Yet the intrepid filmmakers aren’t swayed. Israel, they claim had systems for picking targets and authorizing strikes which led to a criminally high rate of civilian deaths. They go further. They give the impression, without a shred of evidence, that civilian targets were deliberately struck. More, Avraham and Szor flirt with dumping genocide at Israel’s door.
You’d think the filmmakers would get support from a hard left Israeli site. Think again. In Haaretz Raviv Drucker writes that he couldn’t help feeling that the film tries to create an “impression" of the “context in which these terrible things were done".
Very Kafkaesque!
The column titled, “Watching 'NAZA' Shocked Me. So Did What Its Creators Left Out" makes Drucker’s credibility sky high. After all he is one of the select few given access to the movie.
NAZA is cloak and dagger stuff. The witnesses are two dozen nameless and faceless IDF soldiers that once were. They make oral depositions behind a curtain, as it were. War crimes are imputed to the IDF without much by way of evidence while being heavy on impressions. No context either.
Context is bang on crucial if one is desperate to tell the world - as the directors are - that Israel resorted to calculated murder.
Why their harping on such an insidious theme? For Avraham and Szor, stardom beckons. Unless their film conveyed a Gaza trampled by Gestapo Zionists, they’d have had to kiss goodbye to number one pride of place at the Venice festival. And they knew the formula that the judges at the glitzy, woke elitist event could not resist.
The Grand Jury Prize for 2025 went to The Voice of Hind Rajab a story about the IDF spraying a Gaza family’s car with bullets and, to quote a review in Time, the
“Heart-wrenching effect of a child’s voice calling desperately for help. The movie won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, and has since had a blistering run at international film festivals and award shows, earning Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Best International Film."
The precedent would hardly have escaped the Israeli duo, millennial types educated in a cultural milieu hungry for any libellous indictment of their pariah country. The type is identifiable from a mile away: credulous, ignorant, self-serving, deceitful, rigidly anti-Zionist.
No question about the swanky audience in Venice: madly pro-Hamas and paranoid about colonizer Jews, it got to its feet and gave the starry-eyed couple an ovation exactly 24.5 minutes long. Someone timed it.
IDF officials were quick onto the film’s “internal and absurd contradictions". One word, “Orwellian" would better fit the bill. In one breath the Israelis assert that the IDF’s “lawful attacks" caused “unintended harm". Therefore they admit that the attacks had legitimacy. But in the very next breath they raise the roof over Israel’s “murder and policies" based on, they aver, the “total dehumanization of Palestinians."
Is credulous the right excuse for Abraham, Szor and co? Aren’t they merely naive and wet behind the ears young adults? Or, are they, like the movers and shakers that flock to the Venice Festival, in the camp of Hamas?
Avraham as a reporter used the code words that led finally to Oct 7, the code words Hamas uses: “Occupation" and “Oppression." He also speaks of “Jewish-Israeli supremacy as (Israel’s) founding characteristic" and compares “contemporary Israeli conduct" with “historical patterns of dehumanization".
Avraham spun himself into a really difficult web to be extricated when he spoke up for the Palestinian Arab journalists who documented Oct 7. He specifically blamed the IDF for picking them off, thereby “silencing their voices".
“This truth has been documented and known from the very first day, thanks to Palestinian journalists. More than 200 of them were killed by Israel in Gaza. Their voices were silenced and denied."
In the immediate aftermath of Oct 7 a media watchdog uncovered these ‘hero’ reporters as having Hamas connections. A study made it irrefutable that the journalists were “accomplices in crimes against humanity."
“On October 7 Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel."
As to be expected Israel asked for an explanation from AP, Reuters, CNN, and the New York Times. After all, it all boils down to the dreadful but distinct possibility that Oct 7 might have been committed in the expectation of it making news headlines.
Some more context around NAZAR concerns ignorance of the law of armed conflict. There’s that quasi legal expression about ignorance of the law being no defence. Suppose the lad and lass filmmakers were ignorant as all hell.
In point of fact as propagandists they turn out to be quite untalented. The only people who allow the Avraham and Szor to fool them are their fellow travellers. An observer of this dumb breed is a blogger named Ben Croll
“The math couldn’t be simpler. The IDF treats, say, 20 NAZA, (civilian casualties) as an acceptable price for eliminating one military target. Extrapolate that formula across a narrow strip of land with thousands of “active-duty" targets, and the numbers add up fast."
The blogger’s a dunce. Collateral damage, far from being outlawed, is essentially what the laws governing armed conflict require. When an army is planning an attack it is legally bound to calculate the foreseeable number of civilians who might be killed - and be ultra careful to minimize that number or even to call off the attack.
To obey the law of proportionality Israel, without intending to kill, must go to the great trouble of assessing the expected military advantage of a strike. Indeed, one that is not assessed constitutes a war crime.
In this connection remember that using human shields is gold standard practice in the Hamas book of instruction.
It’s bad for the gurus of movie making, and bad for their apologists. The definition of a military target is any target in battle. A family house can be legitimately struck, as can a hospital or a moving ambulance or a mosque.
Fools that they are, the prize winners and apologists and Ben Croll and the judges at the Venice film festival go off the game board when they accuse the IDF of cruel decisions about non-combatants who get in the way and die.
One of the mystery whistleblowers in NAZAR turns philosophical: “Having AI decide who lives or dies is better than leaving it to human hands." He is symptomatic of the whole rumpus. The credo applied to Israel at war - and only Israel - lays down that Jews can never be innocent.
Suppose someone told you that Amnesty Int. wouldn’t allow Israel to not commit a crime. Would you chuckle or lend an ear?
In one of many examples, the lack of evidence of a massacre in the Jenin refugee camp, said Amnesty’s medic, proves that Israel perpetrated a massacre. Professor Derrick Pounder was talking to the media about his preliminary findings from autopsies he carried out in Jenin Hospital.
“What was striking is what was absent. There were very few bodies in the hospital. There were also none who were seriously injured, only the walking wounded. Thus we have to ask: Where are the bodies and where are the seriously injured?"
Nobody can better the cunning Jews at concealing their crimes.
Steve Apfel is a veteran authority on Israel bashing. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007PIVM6G?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback