‘NAZA’ review: Israeli documentary is a living nightmare — and required viewing

Some films hold your face right up to the world’s worst horrors and refuse to let you go for hours, days, even weeks after you’ve viewed them. Such is the case with NAZA, the latest documentary from Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. The pair previously co-directed 2024’s Oscar–winning No Other Land, alongside Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal.

The film is made up almost entirely of interviews with 24 anonymous Israeli military and intelligence officers, conducted by Abraham at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv. As the skyline twinkles behind them and the nighttime hum of the city occasionally filters through their conversations, they tell Abraham how the Israeli military employs AI and high-tech surveillance systems to target and kill Palestinians. Following NAZA’s premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, where it received the Special Jury Prize, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship. 

Each section of NAZA breaks down a specific system Israel uses to bomb Palestinians. “Lavender” is an AI program that creates a kill list of potential targets with links to Hamas. According to reporting from +972 Magazine, Local Call, and NAZA producer The Guardian, upon which the film is based, that list targeted up to 37,000 people based on their phone activity, be that regularly changing a cell phone or operating in proximity to known militants. The AI is imprecise: At one point, an interviewee recalls using Lavender to target a bakery owner who served militants, yet who wasn’t one himself. Another system discussed is “Where’s Daddy?” which monitors the texts of militants’ family members to learn when they will be home. When the texts indicate that the target has arrived at home, Israeli forces know they can bomb the home, killing their target as well as everyone who lives with him.

The Israeli military has come up with a term for the number of additional lives lost when carrying out a strike: NAZA, an acronym for the Hebrew phrase nezek agavi, meaning collateral damage. If they know that 15 people will die in an operation, they do not say that 15 lives will be lost. They say “15 NAZA.” The term is a chilling example of the Israeli military’s dehumanization of Palestinians. With each utterance of “NAZA,” you hear disregard for human life. As interviewees sketch out diagrams of how these systems work, you see how clinical the approach to these operations is.

Abraham and Szor do not show any footage of the horrors these systems wreak in Gaza until the film’s devastating final moments. The effect is not one of concealment, but of accountability: It forces all the attention onto the interviewees, each of whom lays out the facts of their work clearly and precisely. There is no hiding from their words or their broader implications about the large-scale killing taking place mere miles from the interview sites. There is also no hiding from the tactics they use to justify their work. Some interviewees think using a machine to find targets is better than leaving the decision to humans, as it removes the emotion from the killing. One of the architects of Lavender does not see himself as having blood on his hands. Other interviewees reiterate they were just following orders, one saying they’re just a “small cog” in a larger machine.

While the interviewees do occasionally show remorse, witnessing them alienate themselves from the horrors time and again is staggering. Their compartmentalization, as well as Abraham and Szor’s insistence on keeping viewers removed from Gaza, recalls the complicity on display in 2023’s The Zone of Interest, about the day-to-day lives of a German commandant and his family living in the shadow of Auschwitz. (The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer and producer James Wilson serve as producers on NAZA.) That film is both an indictment of one of the greatest atrocities in human history and a warning cry to not let something this evil happen again. 

NAZA is living proof that it is.

NAZA was reviewed out of the New York Film Festival. It is now playing in select New York theaters and expands across the U.S. Oct. 9.