“At the start of the war, we bombed everything,” one soldier says. “Naza [collateral damage] wasn’t an issue.”
The goal, says another soldier, “was quantity, not quality”.
This is some of the gripping testimony from Israeli soldiers who appear in the new documentary Naza, filmed on rooftops in Tel Aviv, their faces in shadow to conceal their identities.
Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has demanded urgent action to identify and prosecute them. He has seized on the film as an issue to motivate his Likud base, with less than two weeks to go until the country’s general election on 27 October.
Naza comes from nezek agavi, Hebrew for “collateral damage”. The film is a record of conversations with 24 members of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), mostly, in the directors’ words, “intelligence officers, working behind screens and participating remotely in the mass killing of Palestinians”. They used high-tech systems, including AI, to gather information, and direct the planes and drones where to bomb. We are inside the brain of the military machine that flattened Gaza and killed more than 74,000 people, according to Palestinian health authorities.
How do you kill so many? The answer, according to the documentary, is 20 at a time. Or occasionally, 100 at a time. Twenty is said to be the number of civilian deaths Israel’s military would accept to get even a low-ranking member of Hamas; 100 for a senior member.
The interviewer, Yuval Abraham, broke the story of the kill ratio for the Tel Aviv magazine +972 in 2024. He puts it to a silhouetted figure on a rooftop: 20 dead for each junior member of Hamas, multiplied by tens of thousands. “You end up with all of Gaza, yes,” the man replies.
One soldier describes his role in the IDF’s Unit 8200, the elite corps responsible for cyber warfare and electronic surveillance. He says he helped design the machine-learning algorithm that identifies mobile phones that may belong to Hamas operatives. Bombs were dropped where the phones were located. But in around 15 per cent of cases, the system picked out someone who had nothing to do with Hamas. He directed one strike to a phone that turned out to belong to a grandmother at home with her family.
The IDF could hack into phones and listen through their microphones. “You feel a bit like God because you hear everything they say.” One soldier describes hearing the sound of a baby inside an apartment. He directed a strike there. Another talks about hacking a 12-year-old girl’s phone to find out when her father – who was on the target list – would be home. The bomb killed the whole family. The soldier was still listening as the girl burned to death. In another case the target had gone out, leaving his phone at home. The bomb killed his family and missed him.
Israel has collected huge amounts of data on the Palestinians, who are perhaps the most surveilled people in the world. An AI system named Lavender would identify a Palestinian as a member of Hamas, and another system – called “Where’s Daddy?” – would tell the soldiers when he had come home. Bombing usually happened at night, when it was more likely the target would be at home, sleeping. But killing Hamas members in this way multiplied civilian casualties.
This did not seem to matter. Hardly anyone refused orders. One soldier recalls the atmosphere in his unit and in the country: “Everyone kept saying: ‘There are no innocent people in Gaza.’” It was a case of “whatever we do, they deserve it”. The film cuts to President Isaac Herzog, on television five days after the October 7 attack: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.”
Some of those interviewed in Naza are stricken about what they did – some feel nothing. One soldier talks of the “insane fun” of planning air strikes – for another it was like a “video game”. A third says they were simply completing their mission. “We never thought about the people in the buildings.”
One soldier recalls a school trip to Poland, where during the Second World War the Jewish population was almost wiped out. “I asked myself how Germans could live with themselves. Now I understand… I still see the Nazis as evil… But what does that make me?”
With such sentiments voiced aloud, it is not surprising there has been a furious reaction from the Israeli government. Netanyahu has promised a bill in the Knesset to remove Israeli citizenship from anyone who “defames” the IDF. The soldiers in the film are, he maintains, at once both lying and revealing state secrets. “It’s shocking. We are fighting global antisemitic incitement and when it comes from within us it is intolerable,” he said in video message.
Netanyahu said the film was like “dozens of ballistic missiles” fired at Israel. Abraham, the journalist behind it, accuses him of incitement to murder.
Israeli cinemas are so far refusing to show Naza. As Kat Lonsdorf of NPR reported, the film “has rocked the country” even though hardly anyone there has seen it.
Former hostages held in Gaza have expressed fury. Among them was Liri Albag, a soldier who was 18 when she was taken and was held for 477 days. She posted on Instagram: “You sold out your own people for people who wish for your death. And for that, there is no forgiveness.” Eliya Cohen – taken hostage at the Nova music festival – said in a video: “People need to spit on them in the streets.”
The IDF, meanwhile, issued a statement of some 4,000 words in an effort to rebut the film’s claims. It said the soldiers’ accounts dealt mainly with the “limited, initial stages” of the targeting process. An earlier IDF response had said that claims in the film were “clearly beyond the knowledge of junior-level soldiers”. Discussion of Naza inside the IDF reflected an effort “to mitigate the possibility of harm to civilians”, the statement said. It accused the filmmakers of “distorting facts, omitting essential context, ignoring previous IDF publications and explanations, and adding emotional manipulation and scripted effects”.
It concluded: “The IDF has acted and continues to act humanely, even if the filmmakers have done everything they can to conceal that fact.”
The film does paint a picture in broad strokes. There are no dates, no precise locations, no identifiable incidents to follow up and investigate. But I found the picture that emerged of the targeting process in Gaza convincing, the soldiers’ testimony believable. The film ends with video from Gaza, a father desperately calling out to his children buried under tonnes of rubble.
At the press screening, nobody moved or spoke for several minutes as the credits rolled. Naza is hard to watch – it should be impossible to ignore.
Naza is in cinemas from 16 October