Israeli documentary NAZA premiered in UK cinemas on Thursday evening, with its filmmakers denouncing the silence surrounding Israel’s genocide in Gaza as they face threats of prosecution and loss of citizenship from Israeli authorities. The nationwide screenings preceded its general release on Friday.
Speaking at a London Q&A, co-director Yuval Abraham said the soldiers and intelligence officers who testified in the film had "different motivations to speak", with some describing their disillusionment after joining the military following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023.
"There are soldiers who describe going to the army after the massacre of October 7th, feeling like that’s what they should be doing–and then after a moment or after some time having disillusionment or a sense that they are themselves involved in crimes," he told a packed London audience.
Others, he said, spoke because they felt there was no space for their accounts in Israel’s media.
"Much of the Israeli mainstream media has been either justifying or completely ignoring the crimes in Gaza, and so sometimes all it took was asking a question," Abraham said.
"These questions that you saw tonight … are still unfortunately not asked enough."
Directed by Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four filmmakers behind the Oscar-winning documentary "No Other Land", NAZA draws on anonymous testimony from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel about the systems underpinning the mass killing of Palestinians. Its title is a Hebrew military acronym for "collateral damage", used to describe the anticipated killing of civilian in an airstrike.
But Abraham said the interviews were not straightforward accounts of remorse. Some participants moved between regret and justifications for their actions, revealing the human mechanisms that allow the military’s machinery to function.
"In the same human being … on the one hand there was maybe regret over what they’ve done, or even an intuitive sense that they should be speaking out," he said. "But on the other hand, it was just as easy for them to justify and to put on the hat of the intelligence operative or soldier, and to speak from that place."
The filmmakers were interested in those contradictions, he added, because alongside examining systems operating at scale, "we are also looking at the mechanisms that allow human beings to do this to other human beings".
The film’s rooftop interviews from Tel Aviv are interspersed with views into Israeli homes, including people watching television news. Szor said those images examined an everyday Israeli ritual–sitting down for the evening bulletin–and what was absent from it.
The intention was "to see the absence of what is there, or justification or the dehumanisation, the words that [are] being used in the media", she said.
Abraham also challenged the idea that intelligence officers necessarily remained detached from the Palestinians whose deaths they helped authorise and were responsible for. While military terminology stripped people of their humanity, surveillance could also simultaneously give officers intimate access to their lives.
"As one person says in the film, we don’t say 15 people will be killed–men, women, children. We say 15 naza," he said.
Yet officers could sometimes access a microphone or phone inside a home being targeted, he added.
"They can listen in and they hear the family or they hear children … that’s [a] very intimate kind of knowledge about the people you are about to kill."
Szor placed that surveillance within the wider infrastructure of Israel’s occupation, linking physical control over Palestinians to control over their telecommunications. "Palestinians have been under Israeli military occupation for a very long time," she said. "The control is not only physical control … but it’s also control over telecommunication infrastructure, and this leads to mass surveillance."
The film, she added, examines "the relationship between the surveillance of that controlled population and the killing of that population"–a relationship with roots not only in Gaza but also in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli threats against filmmakers and sources
Thursday’s premiere came days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded an investigation into the anonymous military sources featured in the documentary.
His office said on Sunday that he had asked the military chief of staff, the head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service and the state attorney to investigate the participants and prosecute them. Netanyahu also described the film as "false, misleading and biased".
The move followed his September pledge to advance legislation stripping citizenship from people who "defame" Israeli soldiers and increasing the statutory damages available in defamation cases twentyfold. Culture Minister Miki Zohar has accused the directors of "treason against the state", while far-right activists have demonstrated outside their families’ homes.
At the Q&A, Executive Producer Jonathan Glazer described the authorities’ reaction as "the rage of cognitive dissonance" when a society is confronted with violence that challenges its understanding of itself.
"You only have two choices, which is to kind of move into some place of truth and honesty, or to sort of explode like a volcano," he said. "I think that reaction … the film describes it."
Paul Lewis, Head of Investigations at The Guardian, said the filmmakers’ relative privilege compared with Palestinian journalists documenting Israel’s assault did not diminish the personal risks they faced.
"There is a cost to them both. The response from the Israeli government is absolutely appalling," he said. "No one who works as a filmmaker or a journalist should be punished for an exercise in telling the truth."
The panellists pointed to the tension between official efforts to discredit the testimony and threats against those who provided it.
"One of the things they say is … this film is false, misrepresentative, tells lies. Simultaneously, Bibi Netanyahu [is] saying that people in the film should be prosecuted for revealing state secrets," Lewis said. "Those two things don’t really make sense."
Despite the backlash, NAZA has secured theatrical distribution in more than 50 countries. Following its Venice premiere, where it won the Special Jury Prize, the film screened at the New York Film Festival and began its US cinema release in late September. Its international rollout includes France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada and Australia.
Israeli cinemas, however, had not agreed to show the documentary as of Thursday, despite an offer to screen it without charge. Abraham has said the filmmakers approached cinemas in Israel in the hope that audiences there could watch it alongside its international release.
The film will also be available worldwide for free on The Guardian’s website from late November, providing an online route for Israeli viewers to see the testimonies. Abraham has said access will have no time limit, citing the film’s "interest and public importance".
For Szor, however, reaching audiences does not guarantee that the violence documented will end.
Reflecting on "No Other Land", which she and Abraham previously made with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, she questioned what international recognition had changed for the communities whose destruction it recorded. The documentary won the Oscar for best documentary in 2025.
"We won the Oscar with that film, and still … the communities there are still destroyed," she said, referring to Israel’s continued displacement and annexation of communities in the South Hebron Hills, where much of the film takes place. "A lot of the world has seen it. It’s all known, and those things are still going on."
"We still made another film, so of course we still either believe in it, or that’s what we chose to do," she added. "I don’t know if it has an impact or it doesn’t."