NAZA: Essential documentary from the co-directors of No Other Land lays bare the machinery of killing in Gaza

• Reviewed from the 2026 Venice Film Festival

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s chilling, essential documentary sits down with anonymous Israeli state agents involved in carrying out mass killings in Gaza – and once you’re done listening, you have the feeling you simply can’t unknow what you’ve heard. A rebuke to both official Israeli denials and international silence and complicity, NAZA details a system of killing and demolition that suggests that the deaths of civilians are not accidental and the destruction supports a larger strategy. 

Some of this material may not surprise anyone who has followed the news since the 7 October Hamas attacks and ongoing Israeli campaigns, but Abraham and Szor’s achievement feels revelatory in its clear-sighted accounting of not only atrocities but also the techniques and thought processes behind them. The film’s interviews with 24 Israeli intelligence agents and military operatives – conducted at night, on Tel Aviv rooftops – only gather force as the film goes along, and the regular cutaways to domestic life viewed through apartment windows sound a damning refrain: ordinary citizens like these are being killed just 60 kilometres away. 

Abraham and Szor are of course the Israeli co-directors of the Academy Award-winning No Other Land (along with Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal), and they bring to bear journalistic precision and a documentary elegance that prevents the film from becoming just a dossier of evidence. Abraham, an investigative journalist, is a deft, low-key, but laser-focused interviewer. He roots out the procedural, like how targets are selected, hacked, mapped, tracked, and killed (allegedly with the help of AI), and the personal, in the normalisation of a daily remit that entails killing civilians.  

The film’s title is a military acronym for the noxious term ‘collateral damage’: the number of civilians expected to be killed in an attack on a military target. As the agents explain in the eerily calm perpetual night of the film, a given target might be assigned a tag like “20 NAZA” or, in one mentioned case, “1,500 NAZA,” meaning that approval was given to kill 20 or 1,500 civilians in the course of an attempt. Strikes on private homes, one says, were preferable because the target would be more likely to be present; family members are therefore routinely murdered too. 

The film neither shies away from the grisly reality of the techniques – one agent hears a target’s daughter burning alive through his hacked phone – nor does it strain for shock value. Yet it is all horrifying, on all levels. “You feel a bit like God because you hear everything they say,” says one agent about the video-game-like process of strikes, while another observes, “Gaza becomes like a factory of targets.” The notion that civilians die because they are used as “human shields” – often cited by officials and supporters – is dismissed by one interviewee as “absurd”: the real reason, they say, is that “it’s just easier” to kill like this.  

Tel Aviv is the setting because it’s home to Israel’s military nerve centre, with intel officers regarded as a “social elite,” but Abraham and Szor gradually expand the film’s purview. Archival clips show glimpses from Israel’s history with Palestine or chest-thumping by government figures (including Benjamin Netanyahu defining terrorism in a way that echoes the interviewees here). But the behind-the-console chronicle of death shifts into another nightmarish gear as interviewees describe the destruction of Gaza and displacement of its inhabitants as part of a strategic goal to secure territory (urgently being pursued, one agent says, before Israel loses international legitimacy). 

By the end, it’s as if a war crimes truth-telling commission has quietly taken place. Executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer, NAZA ultimately broaches the question of genocide. At points, the interviewees draw explicit parallels with Nazi Germany. One reflects that he still regards the Nazis as absolute evil, “but what does that mean I am?” Abraham has no interest in enabling handwringing: when another says he can’t take part any longer in his deadly work, Abraham responds, “You already did.” 

NAZA seems constructed to make impossible the accepted political methods of denial – the avoidance of ever confirming intent to kill, the use of fabrications and media blackouts. It’s a devastating watch, especially having so many of your darkest thoughts and suppositions confirmed, but there’s no turning away from what’s said. In those long shots of people in apartments watching TV or doing yoga, one wonders if Abraham and Szor are showing us the voters responsible for these policies or pointing at all of us.