Naza (Oct 21, 2026)

qathet film society Festival Worthy Films presents:
NAZA - Wed Oct 21, 7pm (80 minutes, unrated)
Directed by: Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
Original Languages: Hebrew, English
2026, 80 min

Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham’s NAZA, a documentary on Israel’s alleged use of AI-assisted military systems to target and kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza, received a record-breaking 24.5-minute ovation at its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Video posted to social media captured the Israeli filmmakers looking solemn — with Abraham appearing to wipe away tears — as the room erupted for the film, which is based on the anonymized testimony of 24 Israeli military insiders.The film opens perched on a Tel Aviv rooftop, his face eclipsed by city lights, an unnamed military systems operator gives NAZA its mission statement: “We have to describe things as they really are.” That he speaks under a shroud of darkness, his identity concealed for fear of legal reprisal, reflects both the danger of doing so in the current climate and the grim solemnity directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor bring to the task.That task doesn’t take the shape of an investigative doc or an exposé. Much of the film’s chilling information has already surfaced, among other outlets, in newspapers like The Guardian, which serves as a producer here. Instead, Abraham and Szor, two of the four-person team behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land, heed their interviewee’s call, laying things out with the same abject candor as their subject. Having delivered the film’s mission statement, the man continues in cool dispassion, describing, in almost recreational terms, how his time behind a high-tech command console has resulted in, oh, at least several thousand deaths.
He’s one of 24 technicians and intelligence officers interviewed here, all of them obscured, all telling variations on the same story in the same language. That last detail matters for a film made by two Jewish-Israeli directors, conducted entirely in Hebrew, that will still inevitably face spurious charges of antisemitism for daring to criticize the machinery of the Israeli state.The film works backward from Gaza’s current state, asking how the death toll, now estimated above 70,000, got so high. The very title gives the answer. NAZA is a portmanteau of the Hebrew words for “collateral damage” (a direct English translation would be “CODA,” if that title weren’t already taken). The math couldn’t be simpler. The IDF treats, say, 20 NAZA, or 20 civilian casualties, as an acceptable price for eliminating one military target. Extrapolate that formula across a narrow strip of land with thousands of “active-duty” targets, and the numbers add up fast. It’s hard to describe all of the feelings provoked by watching a film like Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s NAZA. Outrage for sure. Indignity as well. Most certainly contempt, on a profound level, for the current Israeli regime and its prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu.NAZA won’t fulfill everyone’s expectations. Israel and the IDF have already pushed back against the validity of these revelations, while Palestinian groups will be understandably vexed by a documentary about their pain and deaths being told solely from the perspective of their Israeli oppressors. Yet this sober and thoroughly documented bombshell of an exposé, in which two dozen IDF intelligence officers detail the systematic murdering of civilians in Gaza since October 7th — how it was carried out relentlessly and with state-of-the-art precision — also leaves one with a deadening feeling, as if humanity may have lost all hope.