‘They know the house they are bombing is full of children’: NAZA’s directors on their devastating film about Israeli intelligence

On a darkened rooftop in Tel Aviv, Israeli intelligence officers outline the details of their work. These men tell us how they helped develop an AI mapping tool that trawled for phone signals and recommended apartment buildings in Gaza to bomb. Indirectly, they admit, they are responsible for thousands of deaths, but they never spoke up because that wasn’t their place. “My role is technical,” says one. “I’m just a small cog,” says another.

NAZA – directed by the Israeli film-makers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham and produced by the Guardian – is a chilling documentary about a mass slaughter that was authorised at the highest levels of government. But it is also, primarily, about the process, the system, the little links in the killing chain. Szor and Abraham build their film around the accounts of 24 anonymised military and intelligence insiders. NAZA, we learn, is an acronym used by the intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces prefer to target Hamas terrorists in their homes at night – and if they live with their family, or in heavily populated neighbourhoods, too bad. At one point, a source claims, approval was given to kill 500 NAZA for one Hamas member.

I meet Szor and Abraham at the Venice film festival, where NAZA is competing for the Golden Lion award. The pair won an Oscar for their previous documentary, 2024’s No Other Land (co-directed with Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal), which spotlighted Palestinian resistance in the occupied West Bank. “No Other Land documented horrible crimes,” Abraham says. “But at the same time it gave people … I don’t want to say hope, but some light to latch on to. It’s not a coincidence that this film is all in the dark. We are in a very dark place right now.”

The Gaza health ministry has reported more than 73,000 deaths in three years of Israeli bombardment, the vast majority of which have been civilian casualties. NAZA briefly shows us the rubble, grieving parents, dead children on the ground. Its main backdrop, though, is placid, normal Tel Aviv, just 44 miles to the north, where rush-hour traffic drifts dreamily on the street and the cinematheque is showing a Claude Lanzmann retrospective. Tellingly, the film was executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, the director of The Zone of Interest. It was Glazer, says Szor, who advised on the structure and creative approach, fostering the sense of a home that sits next door to a hell.

NAZA deliberately concerns itself with the system – the policy of mass surveillance, the industrial business of murder – more than the individual psychology of those involved. But presumably its sources must feel guilt and shame, otherwise they’d never have agreed to put their careers and liberty at risk.

‘We are in a very dark place right now’ … a scene from NAZA. Photograph: The Guardian

Abraham is unconvinced. “Well, it depends which one,” he says. “There are many motivations for an individual to speak. Some people talk because they feel the opposite of shame. They feel pride in their accomplishment and expertise. Remember that these people serve in sensitive units. They are not often asked what they do. So there is an attraction to [our] curiosity that drives them to speak up.”

The film uncovers a system that is fiendishly efficient. Its series of disconnects appears designed to distance the perpetrators from the crime. Many of these men work remotely from Tel Aviv. AI selects the target and a drone drops the bomb. Even the language feels purposely euphemistic and obfuscatory. NAZA translates as collateral damage, which in turn translates to human beings.

“Sure, it’s easier to kill people when you’re doing it on a screen,” Abraham says. “There is some truth in that, I guess. But equally it should be said that intelligence officers know the most. They listen to the cellphones. They know the house they are bombing is full of children. They can hear babies crying. They still order another strike.”

What is the status of these men now? Some discuss their work in the past tense. Others don’t, which suggests that they might still be at work, overseeing airstrikes each night. Abraham won’t say; he’s mindful of protecting his sources. “But you can imagine. We are dealing with 24 people, so there is a whole variety of statuses.”

Documentary NAZA gets 25-minute standing ovation at Venice film festival premiere – video

NAZA prompts obvious questions about the creatures of darkness we see on screen. But it prompts intriguing ones, too, about Szor and Abraham, a pair of dissident investigative journalists from the country’s middle class. In the furious, febrile climate of post-7 October Israel, their work is liable to make them pariahs, if not enemies of the state.

Szor jokes that she just wields the camera and therefore keeps out of sight. “Nobody knows who I am, and I’m very happy about that. But some of my family – and some people I’m close to – don’t accept what I do. After the Oscars [last year] they were very ashamed, very angry. But this is a small price to pay.”

Abraham, by contrast, is more vocal and visible. After No Other Land’s premiere at the 2024 Berlin film festival, his family home was targeted by a rightwing mob. “For me, that was the worst moment of all,” he says. “My mum is hoping it doesn’t happen again.”

Even so, he adds quickly, let’s keep things in perspective. “We’re taking risks in a system that privileges us, that has Jewish-Israeli supremacy as its founding characteristic. So yeah, it was scary for my mum. But she went and slept at my sister’s and her house is still there. For so many Palestinians, it’s not a rightwing mob that’s coming to their home: it’s US-funded bulldozers and weapons. Imagine if a Palestinian journalist in Gaza tried to do what we did and called up senior Israeli officials. There is no comparison. They would most likely be murdered.”

Rooftops at night are a good location, says Szor. They lend themselves to contemplation and help people speak more freely. One soldier recalls the “insane fun” of shooting at people who ran towards a food distribution centre. Another remembers visiting Holocaust sites as a boy and wondering how the German people could have acted as they did. “I still see the Nazis as evil,” he says. “But what does that mean I am?”

After its Venice premiere, NAZA is greeted with a 25-minute ovation. Variety calls it a “devastating exposé” of systematic mass slaughter. The Hollywood Reporter claims that its “bombshell” revelations are likely to provoke outrage and disgust “on a profound level, for the current Israeli regime and its prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu”

(The Israeli military on Friday said it “categorically rejects” the allegations made in the documentary, and criticised the film’s use of anonymous testimonies, which it said “cannot be verified”. In its statement to the Guardian, the IDF said that it “makes unprecedented efforts to minimise harm to civilians” during its offensive in Gaza.)

At the official press conference, the film-makers are asked about parallels between the Holocaust and the killing in Gaza. Abraham points out that this connection was made by one of the soldiers in the film. But he takes the man’s point. “When we say ‘never again’ and that we have to learn from what happened in the Holocaust, the way to do that is to think about patterns that can be seen and observed in the present. I’m not saying [the situation is Gaza] is the same or identical. I don’t think it is. But what we should be doing is recognising these similar patterns of demonisation and killing.”

Who are these men who we can barely see on the screen? The polite data analysts. The soft-spoken officers. Almost all, it turns out, are products of Tel Aviv’s middle class: intelligent, educated and liberal, at least up to a point. Or to put it more bluntly, these are Szor and Abraham’s people. They come from the same neighbourhoods, share similar interests and probably have friends in common. It’s the ultimate paranoid horror trope: the call that comes from inside the house. It shows the extent of the rot and the film-makers’ own proximity to it.

NAZA asks how these men helped kill tens of thousands of civilians. That’s somehow simpler and less frightening than asking why. Abraham shakes his head. “And I have to say I don’t have a clear answer as to why so many people took part in this. And why so few people – in fact, I don’t know of any – refused in real time to do it. It’s scary what that says about the state of Israel. When people talk about genocide, they often speak about it as something that spreads across society, this general atmosphere that normalises death. When everyone else is doing it, it’s easier not to ask questions.”