When NAZA – an 80-minute documentary by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor about the IDF’s alleged conduct in Gaza – premiered at the Venice Film Festival last month, it received a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation.
Days later, it won the festival’s Special Jury Prize.
Naturally, it has since attracted enormous attention from Israel’s detractors around the world – not to mention considerable coverage from the mainstream media.
Built largely around interviews with 24 anonymized Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel, NAZA alleges that AI-assisted systems were used to identify targets and that Israeli forces knowingly accepted high numbers of civilian casualties when striking Hamas terrorists.
Among the film’s most explosive claims is that numerical “NAZA” – collateral damage – thresholds governed attacks, with one interviewee claiming that a strike was once approved despite an anticipated toll of 500 civilians.
It is an extraordinary allegation.
And now one met by a detailed IDF response.
The IDF Spokesperson accuses its filmmakers of presenting a “distorted, misleading, and unrealistic picture” of how targets are identified, strikes planned and attacks ultimately authorized.
And its rebuttal goes directly to some of NAZA’s central claims.
First, the IDF states categorically that it has never planned, authorized, or carried out a strike in Gaza in which 500 civilian deaths – or anything approaching that number – were anticipated.
It also rejects the suggestion that IDF directives automatically authorized strikes based on predetermined civilian casualty thresholds – for example, 20 civilians for a low-ranking terrorist or 200 for a senior commander.
Then there is artificial intelligence. NAZA has generated headlines around the IDF’s alleged use of AI in targeting. But according to the IDF, artificial intelligence has never independently selected targets for strikes. Intelligence officers identify targets, relevant professionals plan attacks, and operational commanders make the decision whether to strike.
The IDF also says “Lavender,” frequently invoked in reporting about Israel’s targeting process, is not a list of targets automatically pre-approved for attack. It describes it instead as a database used to assist intelligence analysts.
But perhaps the IDF’s most important criticism concerns what NAZA leaves out.
According to the military, many of the anonymous interviewees presented as former Intelligence Corps personnel would have been exposed only to limited, preliminary intelligence stages of the process. They would not necessarily have participated in – or even had knowledge of – the much broader process through which strikes were planned, legally reviewed, modified, approved or rejected.
Yet those other participants are largely absent from the documentary.
The film does not, the IDF argues, adequately show the professionals tasked with minimizing civilian casualties, the legal advisers reviewing proposed strikes, or the operational commanders ultimately responsible for approving or rejecting them.
That omission matters, because estimating possible civilian casualties before an attack is not, in itself, evidence of indifference to civilian life. It is precisely what militaries are required to do when assessing proportionality and taking precautions under the laws of armed conflict.
The IDF says those assessments resulted repeatedly in demands for additional intelligence, changes to attack plans, different choices of weapons and, in some cases, strikes being canceled altogether because of the danger to civilians. In other words, NAZA takes the very existence of a system designed to assess potential collateral damage and presents it as evidence of something sinister. The IDF argues that this turns the purpose of the process on its head.
It also accuses the filmmakers of stripping away the wider context in which those decisions were being made: Hamas’s October 7 massacre, its embedding of military infrastructure among Gaza’s civilian population, and the IDF measures intended to reduce civilian casualties, including warnings, evacuations, weapons selection and strike modification.
None of this means that civilian deaths in Gaza are not tragic. Nor does the IDF claim that mistakes were never made.
Indeed, the military says hundreds of combat incidents have been examined or investigated, including cases involving unintended civilian casualties, precisely so that mistakes can be identified and lessons learned.
But tragedy is not evidence of criminality. The moral weight felt by soldiers involved in attacks is not evidence that those attacks were unlawful. And calculating potential civilian harm is not evidence that the IDF considered civilian lives expendable.
These are distinctions that a documentary purporting to reveal how Israel actually conducts its military operations should surely make clear.
Instead, according to the IDF, NAZA relies heavily on anonymous personnel whose knowledge of the complete targeting process may be limited, omits key participants in that process, employs manipulative editing and historical comparisons, and presents contested allegations as evidence of a predetermined narrative.
In conjunction with this IDF statement, a documentary film called NAZA: The Real Story has been released as a direct counterpoint to Abraham and Szor’s film.
At 48 minutes long, it features interviews with senior IDF commanders and intelligence officers who ran operations in Gaza, and sets out to show how they say the war was fought.
It presents the part of the story NAZA largely leaves out: the people responsible for actually planning and approving operations explaining the procedures, restrictions and decisions that governed them.
Which leaves anyone who watched NAZA, applauded it, awarded it prizes or reported its allegations as revelations with a simple obligation.
Watch this one too.
If 25 minutes of applause greeted accusations against Israel, surely 48 minutes isn’t too much to ask to hear the other side.
You can – and should – watch the full movie here.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
