Inside Israel's Killing Machine: The Secret Interviews Behind Naza

The Word Nobody Should Have to Know

NAZA is not a name. It is an acronym — short for the Hebrew word for collateral damage — used inside Israeli intelligence to quantify how many civilians a targeted airstrike is expected to kill. It appears in the documentary Naza as both title and subject, the kind of cold bureaucratic language that turns human beings into arithmetic.

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli filmmakers behind the 2025 Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, have returned with something harder and more concentrated. Their new film, the only documentary in this year’s Venice Film Festival competition, traces that bureaucratic language back to the machinery that produces it. It features 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers who describe, in detail, the surveillance and remote-strike operations that targeted Palestinian civilians in Gaza. All spoke on condition of anonymity. Their faces and voices were digitally altered. They were filmed at night, on rooftops across Tel Aviv, because three years of total secrecy was the only way this film exists at all.

The project was executive produced by Jonathan Glazer — the director of The Zone of Interest — and produced by Guardian Films and JW Films. It carries the weight of that lineage. But unlike Glazer’s meticulously composed Holocaust allegory, Naza is unmistakably about now.

How You Build a Witness Pool in Secret

Abraham works as an investigative journalist. That professional background matters here. He had been searching for insiders within the Israeli system for years, building sources in tandem with reporting published by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call. Naza does not invent its revelations. It amplifies a network that already existed.

The filmmakers spent three years on the project, assuming at every step that Israeli state agencies would try to prevent its completion. Getting 24 soldiers to speak required more than access — it required convincing people who had participated in a war that most Israelis prefer not to examine in detail. As Szor noted, the mainstream Israeli media offers no platform for these kinds of testimonies. That absence may be precisely why so many were willing to talk: they were being asked something their own country’s newsrooms had not asked them.

The Architecture of Denial

The film’s most structural argument is also its simplest: denial is not a passive failure of awareness. It is a condition that enables continued violence. Abraham was blunt about this in Venice. The denial of what is happening in Gaza, he said, is itself a factor in the crimes persisting.

Consider the timing. The interview took place during a week in which an eight-year-old girl, Wafaa Akila, was killed in Gaza along with her father, and Israel bombed a school on the same day, killing a first grader. These events are not anomalies inside the film’s logic. They are outputs of the system the soldiers describe.

The international media has, the filmmakers argue, normalized the normalization of these deaths. When killings happen daily for two years, they cease to register as news and begin to register as routine. The apparatus that sustains that routine — in Washington, in European capitals — benefits from the blur. Unconditional military aid and diplomatic cover flow through that blur.

Naza tries to replace the blur with a specific view from inside the machine. The soldiers describe the use of AI to select targets. They describe strikes on humanitarian food distribution sites. They describe the targeting of displaced people returning to their neighborhoods. And they describe, most chillingly, the deliberate targeting of entire families in their homes — the precise calculation that gives the film its title.

Tel Aviv at Night

The film’s aesthetic choices are not decorative. Shooting on Tel Aviv rooftops at night serves multiple purposes at once. The background cannot be neutral — it must remind the viewer that this is Israel’s main military headquarters city, and that the orders described in the interviews originate from these streets. Yet the very same city, just 60 kilometers away from Gaza, functions as a place where most residents live as though the war is a screen on their phones rather than a structure they sustain.

Szor and Abraham deliberately minimized footage from Gaza until the film’s final act. The decision was influenced by Glazer’s approach in The Zone of Interest: the victims remain out of sight but never out of mind. What Naza shows instead is the banality from which violence flows — the conversations, the systems, the casual language of targeting. The film asks viewers to sit with the idea that ordinary Israelis carry out extraordinary violence as a matter of duty, not fanaticism.

The Election Question Everyone Asks

When Europe and the United States hesitate to impose sanctions or apply diplomatic pressure, the default excuse is often the same: another Israeli government is coming, and things will change. Abraham dismantled this assumption cleanly.

Israel held elections in October 2026. He acknowledged that Jewish Israeli democracy could improve — the current government is corrupt and has weakened democratic mechanisms for its own citizenry. But for Palestinians, he said, he foresees no substantial change. The 2022 election produced a government of change, and house demolitions and settler violence in the West Bank worsened. Gaza policies under that government were nearly identical to the current one.

The consensus across the Israeli political spectrum — including what Abraham calls the Zionist leftist parties — runs remarkably deep. These are parties that do not discuss the killing of more than 70,000 Palestinians in public political life. That silence, he argued, is itself evidence of the systemic nature of the violence. It is not a few bad actors. It is a structure that operates with near-total agreement across the political compass.

Can the Film Survive Its Makers’ Country

Abraham and Szor did not make this film in exile. They live in Israel. Their families, friends, and sense of meaning are rooted there. When asked whether they could return, Abraham’s answer was direct: he sees no reason why they should not be able to. He also acknowledged that the Israeli state could retaliate and hoped it would not.

Showing Naza inside Israel remains a central goal. Abraham called it essential — a film Israeli society should see, a chance for reckoning with what the military did, what the government did, and what so many citizens participated in. The obstacles are numerous. But the filmmakers intend to clear as many as they can.

Why This Matters Beyond Venice

Naza arrives at a moment when the international community has largely accepted a frozen horror — enough grief to provoke statements, not enough outrage to alter policy. The film’s contribution is not new information in the strictest sense. Palestinians have been describing these events for two years. The innovation is the inside view: soldiers describing their own participation, not as monsters, but as functionaries following a system they help sustain.

That distinction matters. The soldiers in Naza are not confessing to rogue actions. They are describing institutional processes — AI target selection, collateral-damage calculations,remote operations from Tel Aviv command centers. The horror is not in individual cruelty. It is in administrative normalcy.

If the film achieves what Abraham and Szor hope — if it makes denial harder, if it forces viewers in Washington, London, Berlin, and Rome to confront the specificity of what their governments enable — then Naza will have done what documentaries rarely manage. It will have converted moral abstraction into something that looks, sounds, and feels like a system you can point at and say: this is how it works.

The 24 soldiers who appeared in this film took enormous personal risk. Their testimonies may not stop the bombing. But they remove the excuse of ignorance that has protected it for so long.