NAZA ¦ Film Review (4*): One of the Most Depressing But Most Important Documentaries of the Year.

A One Mann’s Movies review of “NAZA”. (2026, 4*, 15).

After watching the documentary “No Other Land“, about the intimidation and displacement of residents of the West Bank by Israeli settlers, I was spitting mad. After watching Naza, made by the same team, I felt real sadness. The Gaza war is a tragedy that is so mind-numbing and with a loss of innocent life that is so enormous, that my feelings in these first few hours after watching the film feels like great sorrow about a world so totally fucked-up. Perhaps this will evolve into anger later.

One Mann’s Movies Rating:

Plot:

This hard-hitting documentary interviews ex-members of the Israeli Intelligence service about their campaign of bombing in Gaza.

Certification:

UK: 15; US: R. (From the BBFC website: “Disturbing scenes, images of real dead bodies.”)

Talent:

Starring: Yuval Abraham.

Directed by: Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor.

Written by: Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor.

Running Time: 1h 20m.

Review:

Positives:

• We start the film with a statement that the filmmakers have hidden the identity of the people they are interviewing, including digitally altering their voices. When you hear what secrets they spill, you can understand that. I’m quite sure Mossad will be deeply analysing the film to identify who these ‘traitors’ actually are, and I frankly fear for them.
• “Naza” (after ‘Nezek Agavi’: “collateral damage”) is a metric used by Israeli intelligence to assess the collateral casualties from a missile strike or bombing. The number does not discriminate between adults and children. Every building in Gaza has been given a number: and Israeli intelligence is such that where a Hamas suspect is resident there, they know the Naza number for that property. So, for example, where a family of a wife and six children live with the man, the Naza would be 7. And so, horrifically, although not doing the maths, the people responsible for these strikes – coldly recount how thousands of strikes against Hamas targets had a collective Naza of tens of thousands of innocents.
• Most of the interviews that comprise the film happen on the rooftops of a building in Tel Aviv. Between these horrifying sound bites, the camera roams over the windows of apartment buildings, looking into the comfortable, cosy and well-ordered lives of the Tel Aviv residents: like a version of “Rear Window“. It neatly counterpoints the destruction that is going on a mere 60 kilometers down the coast.
• The film is structured into a number of hard-hitting chapters.
  • The first chapter covers the identification of Hamas targets using Israeli’s expertise in computing, telecoms and AI. Newsreel footage shows how the Israeli’s themselves implemented the telecoms networks in the whole of Gaza so that they could achieve surveillance of every single phone call and communication that happens in the region. Now, perhaps – despite what the government says – we have that in the UK via GCHQ. But I’d like to think not. It is a truly chilling proposition and symptomatic of Israel’s general levels of paranoia. An analyst describes how he developed an AI program – the “Lavender system” – that identified the ‘characteristics’ of the phone communications of Hamas members and then searches across every phone in the region looking for matches. A points-based system is used. You get points if you saved someone as, e.g., “Hamas Ahmed” in your phone. You get points if you communicate with a known Hamas member (so, tough luck for the owners of a bakery that happened to be in the neighbourhood of Hamas operatives… that bread order could get you killed). The Lavender system identified 6,000 to 7,000 phones that were thought to be ‘Hamas’. Those phones became the target for strikes. So AI basically “decided who lived and who died”. A “15% error rate” was considered “acceptable” in terms of collateral damage: but, of course, each of those men targeted will have a ‘Naza number’ of women and children also struck. The interviewer, Yuval Abraham, goes in hard with the AI developer as the person responsible for this: obviously squirming and uncomfortable, the man objects that he never pulled the trigger: that he was but a “small cog” in a big machine.
  • A stark message from one interviewee admitted that after the Hamas October 7th massacre, “there are no innocent people in Gaza”. You can see how pure hatred is driving this killing machine. They describe how they are able to listen through the phones of the target family to hear if “Daddy’s Home”, the code word to proceed with a hit. In traumatic testimony, one of them describes how they can hear families playing and praying and a baby crying in the background. “How can you continue with a strike when you hear a baby in the house?” Abraham asks? Noone seems to be in a position to raise any concern or talk against a strike. Another family obliterated. A nauseating TV broadcast shows Benjamin Netanyahu stating that “we are doing everything to protect civilians”. Yeah, right!
  • One of these men in charge of the strikes described how “insanely fun” it was. Another describes it as like a “video game”, since everything was done remotely. Others clearly have deep regret about what they did, although all quote that they were “only following orders”. A wonderfully ironic insert from the movie Eye in the Sky shows drone pilots Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) and Carrie Gershon (Phoebe Fox) absolutely devastated when a single young boy becomes collateral damage in a drone strike. Here, they talk about a Naza number, in one case, of 500 (FIVE HUNDRED!) in a strike to eliminate a single senior Hamas member. There is little remorse shown for the tens of thousands of woman and children they have killed.
  • A horrifying chapter outlines how the Israelis moved on to creating ‘Annihilation zones’: a systematic process to utterly destroy every single building, block by block. After a comprehensive bombing, an IDF member describes how they went from home to home – seeing memories like photo albums and school reports – and burnt them all, just to make sure that the displaced household would never return. “We become experts in burning houses” one claims. What he describes is systematic ethnic cleansing: bombing whole neighbourhoods even knowing that 25% of the population would still be there: and then monitoring the aftermath via drones, watching the local feral dogs eat the bodies of the dead children. (“No, I didn’t want to watch that… but many in the team did”.) One interviewee agrees with Abrahams that, yes, this is indeed genocide.
  • Another chapter briefly looks at “Bibi’s Department”: a department whose sole mission is to spy on the associates of Gaza victims and control the ‘message’ that is being sent out to the international community. The interviewee explains how they use a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign – basically blackmail – to stomp on negative press to allow the West to keep supporting the Israeli actions. One guy calls it “peace thwarting”: the Israelis want every excuse to continue the war against Hamas.
  • We close with a sickening on-the-ground look at the aftermath of a devastating strike on an apartment block in Gaza: a grieving father, desperately shouting to his obviously dead wife and young son under the impossibly heavy rumble. Grim.
• The film really works best in its more contemplative moments:
  • In one, an Israeli intelligence officer described how he went on a school trip to see the concentration camps in Poland. “I still see those Nazis as evil” he says. “But what does that make me?”
  • In an historical interview that drips with irony, Benjamin Netanyahu talks about his 1995 book “Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists”. The interviewer asks him to define terrorism which he replies is “the murder of civilians for political ends”: exactly what he is executing in Gaza!

Negatives:

• A sequence about the shooting of hungry Palestinians while waiting for food distribution is a bit confusing. There is talk of a “bridge” and a “valley” but I couldn’t quite envisage what the scenario was. It was clearly horrific, with snipers picking off people whose only crime was that they were desperately hungry and were not following the exact rules. But the details were a bit muddy: perhaps some better graphics would have helped – the film relies on a lot of napkin scribbling when perhaps some overlay graphics might have assisted comprehension.
• How is any of this defensible? I don’t think it is, but as always with these documentaries that present a very partisan view on a subject, I’d love to see what the counter-argument might be. Because the film opens itself up to being described as a “one-sided rant”. Giving some air to Israeli politicians to respond to the accusations would have been enlightening, even if your opinion as a viewer at the end might not have changed.

Summary Thoughts:

Wiki reports that as of 9 October 2026 , at least 77,632 people (75,586+ Palestinians and 2,046+ Israelis) have been reported killed in the Gaza war. And this is probably the tip of the iceberg when you consider those lost through secondary starvation and disease. Among the statistics are an estimated 21,000+ Palestinian children killed and another 44,000+ wounded. The subject is obviously highly emotive, and rightly so. It is difficult to see how this obvious evidence of war crimes could be argued against, but it would have been ‘fun’ (wrong word) to find out. Some sort of ‘right of reply’ from the Israeli government would have been interesting.

I’m not sure I’m sufficiently qualified to comment on the complexity of events in the Middle East, but I can guess what this would be. Whenever I see these sorts of arguments reflected back by Israeli politicians, they always seems to take one of two angles:

1. “Ah but remember October 7th”: As if the world doesn’t fully understand how traumatic it must have been for Israel to see over 1300 of their young people killed (and many also raped beforehand) at the hands of Hamas terrorists. And then to suffer the horror over a number of years of having over 200 Israelis kidnapped and held in Gaza. Everyone surely appreciates that this was an utterly heinous action by Hamas and those responsible will surely have a one-way ticket to Hell, if such a place exists. But it is surely the proper response of a civilised Western government to act proportionately. And what has happened in Gaza – and as the film makes clear, continues to happen – is wildly disproportionate. Sadly, it comes across as a good excuse to execute ethnic cleansing of a troublesome itch.
2. “Oh, you must be anti-semitic”: This seems to be a ‘go-to’ on social media whenever Israel’s government is criticised. This is nuts! I, for one, don’t have an antisemitic bone in my body: I have nothing against Jews, Moslems, Christians, Jedis or any other people who have found religion being free to practice their faith, provided they respect each other and respect the right of the many people (including myself) that chooses not to follow any religion at all. But to conflate that concept with the unreasonable and criminal behaviour of a specific government, that happens to have a majority of a specific religion in their country, is patently absurd. You can clearly criticise Netanyahu and his Israeli regime without criticising Judaism.

This article is diverging significantly from what I would call a ‘usual film review’. But that is all credit to the film-makers in sparking such thoughts and driving lively debate on what is an appalling and ongoing tragedy. Although a large number of contributors in the end titles were marked as “Anonymous”, those who did put their names to this – and particularly the writer/directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor – are clearly putting their lives in danger. Having been searched and interrogated at length by the Israeli army on leaving Tel Aviv, the one time I was there on a business trip (in much more peaceable times), it’s astonishing to me that they were actually able to smuggle out this footage without having it confiscated and destroyed. Filming through the windows of the Israeli Intelligence Service’s headquarters building in Tel Aviv certainly shows some serious cojones!

This is a film that is important. It is a film you should see. It is, however, not a happy experience and 100% falls into my definition of a “Father Ted Film“.

Where to watch?

Trailer:

The trailer for the film is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIBRLEEaueo.

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