NAZA's Biggest Claims, and Why the IDF Says They're Wrong
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The controversial documentary accuses Israel's army of treating civilian lives as expendable. The IDF answers its claims one by one.
NAZA is the documentary everyone is talking about. At the Venice Film Festival on September 10, 2026, it earned a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation, and won the Special Jury Prize. Its charge is devastating: that Israel's army knowingly accepted massive civilian casualties in Gaza.
The film was commissioned by Britain's The Guardian and made by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who also collaborated on No Other Land, the Academy Award-winning documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Abraham interviews 24 people who identify themselves as Israeli soldiers and intelligence officials. Each sits on a dark Tel Aviv rooftop at night, unnamed, with face and voice digitally altered. It makes for striking cinema.
The subject is collateral damage (nezek agavi in Hebrew, or "NAZA" for short): how much civilian harm Israel was willing to accept to strike military targets in Gaza. The interviewees claim the army allowed up to 500 civilian deaths for a single target (the figure the film's promotional material highlights), that artificial intelligence picked targets, and that Israeli strikes had a 15% error rate. The film includes no dissenting voices.
"NAZA" sounds a lot like "Nazi," and the film leans into it. At one point the camera lingers on a billboard of Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah ("Holocaust" in Hebrew), the landmark Holocaust documentary. Even The Guardian's own review admits that one speaker invokes a comparison to Nazism "inevitably and glibly." Once NAZA finishes its theatrical run, The Guardian plans to stream it free on its website, permanently. There it will join Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, a harshly antizionist and antisemitic play that likens Jews to Nazis, which the paper also offers free, in perpetuity.
The film has quickly become a symbol of pro-Arab, anti-Israel feeling. Outside the Venice screening, antizionist activists flew kites, a deliberate echo of the incendiary kites Hamas has sent over the border from Gaza into Israel. And on October 1, 2026, at a screening in Delft, the Netherlands, October 7 survivor Sabine Taasa stood up to send a message to Abraham and Szor. Hamas terrorists murdered her husband, Gil, and their son, Or, on October 7, 2023. As Sabine began telling the Dutch audience how her family was killed, the crowd laughed and jeered: "Nobody cares!" "We don't want to hear it!" "Go away!" As she walked out, they roared "Shame on you!" at her back.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has released a detailed response in Hebrew and English. It says NAZA "presents a distorted, misleading, and disingenuous picture of the IDF's target planning and striking process," that its "narrative is based on substantial factual errors," and that the film "inverts reality." Here are the film's central claims, and the IDF's answers.
Collateral damage is a standard professional term, used by every law-abiding military in the world. Estimating expected harm to civilians is something international law requires. The IDF does it so commanders can decide whether a strike is lawful, add precautions, change the plan, or cancel it, "as IDF commanders did many times during the war." The film takes that careful effort and presents it as proof of indifference to civilian life.
This allegation is front and center in the film's trailer. The IDF's answer: it "has never planned, approved or carried out a strike in Gaza in which 500 civilians, or anything close to that number, were expected to be killed." No one has seriously claimed any IDF strike caused a toll anywhere near that, and the filmmakers offer no evidence for it.
"In the IDF, artificial intelligence does not determine whether an object or a person is designated as a target, nor whether a target is struck." Human analysts identify targets under set procedures, and an authorized intelligence officer approves them. Officers from several fields then review each proposed strike, and an operational commander makes the final decision under international law. Data tools simply help analysts sift intelligence they have already gathered.
As for the system called Lavender, the film treats it as a hit list. The IDF explains: "'Lavender' is not a list of targets approved to strike. As the IDF previously explained publicly, it is a database with the purpose of cross-referencing intelligence sources, in order to produce up-to-date layers of information on operatives in terror organizations in the Gaza Strip. A person's inclusion in 'Lavender' does not identify that person as a target, let alone authorize a strike against him."
This confuses who is allowed to approve a strike with permission to carry one out. Under IDF rules, higher estimates of civilian harm require sign-off from more senior officers, standard practice in Western militaries. A threshold like that "is not a permitted number of civilian casualties." Every commander must still judge each individual strike for proportionality. And no 200-casualty approval threshold for a military target "has ever applied or existed."
True, the IDF says, because international law requires exactly that: a civilian is a civilian at any age, and no life counts for less. In practice, "the presence of different categories of civilians, and children in particular, led commanders to cancel, postpone or replan strikes."
Several IDF units review strike outcomes, including reports of civilian harm, and the interviewees don't appear to have served in any of them. Those reviews led to debriefs on hundreds of incidents. Every suspected violation must be reported, and the Military Advocate General decides whether a criminal investigation is warranted.
IDF directives prohibit targeting civilians. Troops near the sites were permitted to fire only at military operatives and suspects posing an immediate threat. The sites operated in an active war zone, where armed militants deliberately blended into crowds. After several tragic incidents, the IDF held debriefs, issued new instructions, and added signs, physical barriers, and new access routes. Exceptional incidents went to the General Staff Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism, and credible allegations of misconduct can lead to criminal investigations and indictments.
"An algorithm has never decided on a strike." A building must first be identified as a military target, and a warning never permitted commanders to ignore civilians still present. What the film calls "neighborhoods" were often Hamas combat compounds: clusters of buildings housing command posts, weapons, lookout and anti-tank positions, and tunnel shafts, all linked underground. Even then, each building had to be designated a military target on its own and assessed for proportionality.
The film goes further, painting Israeli soldiers as sadistic and malicious. The IDF responds: "The distinction between military operatives and civilians is fundamental to the IDF, its commanders and its binding directives during the fighting in Gaza. This distinction is unequivocally expressed in every protocol or directive that address targeting processes in the IDF." One interviewee's statement may reflect his personal feelings, the IDF says, but it in no way represents the army's approach.
Asked directly, one interviewee says yes. The IDF calls the accusation "outrageous and unfounded." Under international law, genocide requires the specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Polling anonymous non-experts who took no part in command decisions proves nothing. Israel's goals were to dismantle Hamas and create the conditions to bring the hostages home. The warnings, cancelled strikes, and humanitarian aid, the IDF notes, were measures to protect the very population Israel is accused of trying to destroy.
Beyond the specific claims, the IDF challenges the film's foundation: the assumption that its sources know what they're talking about. The anonymous interviewees appear to be speaking about matters "beyond their knowledge and competence." Abraham says he interviewed scores of soldiers, but with no names, or even ranks, there's no way to judge whether his damning portrait is accurate.
The speakers appear to be lower-level intelligence personnel. "Their accounts generally focus on limited, initial stages dealing with intelligence, rather than the much broader process of planning and approving strikes, which is the responsibility of operational bodies that manage and conduct targeting rather than the IDF's intelligence corps." An analyst might recall an early estimate of civilians near a target and assume it was final, without knowing the strike was later narrowed, the weapon or timing changed, or civilians evacuated after warnings. Many of the film's errors, the IDF says, "appear to stem from interviewees unfamiliar with the entire targeting process."
The film never shows the extensive network of military and civilian experts who weigh in on proposed strikes, including independent legal advisers, or those who kept humanitarian aid flowing into Gaza while fighting raged between Israel, Hamas, and its proxies.
Strangely, NAZA downplays Hamas's full-scale invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, when about 6,000 fully armed and trained Hamas soldiers invaded Israel, with thousands of Gazan civilians following them. Without that context, the IDF says, the "filmmakers completely mischaracterize Israel's objectives in the war."
The film also skips over how "Hamas systematically and extensively embedded military operatives, weapons and military infrastructure within and beneath civilian areas, exploiting hospitals, UN facilities, schools and mosques for military purposes." Hamas used civilians as shields, and its fighters wore civilian clothes. That is the core of the issue the film claims to examine. As the IDF puts it, this context "explains why combat took place in urban areas and adversely affected civilians, as a result of Hamas' choice, not Israel's."
Also missing: what the IDF actually did to protect civilians. It cancelled or never approved many strikes because of the risk to civilians. It set up a dedicated Civilian Harm Mitigation Cell to issue warnings and track civilian movement across Gaza. And through COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories), Israel facilitated the entry of more than 3.9 million metric tons of food into Gaza since October 2023.
Anonymous interviews may make for dramatic footage, but they undercut NAZA's claim to be a serious documentary in the tradition of Claude Lanzmann, whom the film deliberately invokes. Lanzmann's 1985 masterpiece Shoah is built on on-camera interviews with eyewitnesses who appear under their real identities, including perpetrators who had asked to stay anonymous.
"The filmmakers could have identified and avoided the substantial errors apparent in the film had they conducted adequate verification and corroboration in good faith," the IDF writes. "The end result shows they did not." The film cites no military directives, records, or other corroborating evidence. Its accounts of alleged strikes name no target, date, place, or casualty figures, so neither the IDF nor viewers can check them.
The filmmakers never approached the IDF for a response before release, a basic practice of investigative journalism, and declined its request for a copy of the film afterward. Some interviewees do "raise serious dilemmas posed by asymmetric warfare," the IDF acknowledges, but the film's "simplistic account does not treat them with the seriousness they deserve."
NAZA raises serious questions, but at heart it's a deeply unserious movie.
A hard-hitting documentary asks hard questions in the open. NAZA acts like it has something to hide, starting with the faces, voices, names, and jobs of the two dozen Israelis it features. It sidelines Hamas's strategy of embedding fighters in schools, hospitals, mosques, and apartment buildings to drive up civilian casualties. And, the IDF says, it "deepens this distortion of reality through manipulative editing of interviews and alluding to historical atrocities, while falsely and baselessly attributing malicious intentions to the IDF that the purported 'evidence' in the film does not substantiate."
The IDF doesn't dismiss the moral weight some interviewees describe. Decisions that may cost civilian lives are among the hardest any soldier faces, and the army expects its people to feel that weight. That burden, it says, reflects how seriously those decisions were made. It is no proof that they were unlawful.
Sadly, the IDF's response brings to mind the saying often attributed to Mark Twain: "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." NAZA portrays Israel as a monstrous nation bent on cruelty, and for Israel's detractors, no IDF report will change that.
As NAZA opens in more theaters, it's up to us to educate ourselves and others, and to answer its innuendo and half-truths with the facts: less cinematic, far more complicated, and true.
