NAZA: Why the world watches only when Israelis document genocide
Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan writes in Middle East Eye on 7 October 2026 :
Would anyone be calling NAZA a masterpiece if a Palestinian had made it?
The filmmaker Daniele Rugo and I were asking each other that as we walked out of a screening at the Zurich Film Festival of the new documentary in which 24 anonymous Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers describe how they killed Palestinians in Gaza. Daniele’s own film, Life Support, which my organisation, Health Workers 4 Palestine, is proud to have backed as associate producers, was having its international premiere.
Between us, we had watched Palestinian doctors, nurses and journalists document the destruction of Gaza in real time for three years, many of them at the cost of their lives. Neither of us could remember their work being received like this.
Since its premiere in Venice, where it won the Special Jury Prize, NAZA has been greeted as a reckoning. Critics have called it essential, devastating, the new authority on what Israel has done in Gaza. Its directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, made the Oscar-winning No Other Land with their Palestinian colleagues Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal.
Their new film, produced by the Guardian with Jonathan Glazer as executive producer, sits its witnesses on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, faces hidden, and lets them explain, calmly and in detail, how the killing was done.
It is an important document, and it took courage to make, but our question would not go away. Had a Palestinian filmmaker brought us the same truth from the other end of the rifle, would it have premiered in Venice, been co-produced by a national newspaper and been talked about for the Oscars? We both suspected we knew the answer.
No confession needed
The title, NAZA is a Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage: the civilians Israel decides in advance it is willing to kill. The rules of engagement described in the film allowed for up to 20 of them per target. That number alone should end any remaining debate about intent.
What stayed with me, though, was less a statistic than the tone. These men and women are billed as whistleblowers, but whistleblowing implies conscience. What I heard instead was procedure: targets sketched on notepads, strikes recounted like shift handovers, homes full of families reduced to a ratio. Some had doubts about strategy, or about whether any of it worked, but remorse for the people they killed was almost entirely absent.