<\/p>\n
Much of the documentary NAZA is filmed on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, where Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham conducted one-on-one interviews with Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel.<\/p>\n
For most of the shattering and damning new documentary NAZA, we are on a series of rooftops in Tel Aviv, watching the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham conduct one-on-one interviews with Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel.<\/p>\n
The rooftop footage was filmed at night, mostly by Abraham\u2019s co-director, Rachel Szor, and their interview subjects \u2014 24 of them in total \u2014 are all cloaked in darkness. We\u2019re told that their appearances and voices have been digitally altered to protect their anonymity. In precise detail, they speak about their role in launching the airstrikes that have killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since the Hamas-led attacks in Israel<\/a> on Oct. 7, 2023, when around 1,200 people were killed and 250 hostages were taken.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, NAZA has already stirred considerable outrage<\/a> \u2014 much of it, it should be noted, from people who haven\u2019t seen and maybe never will see it. Abraham and Szor, both Israeli filmmakers, have been denounced as traitors in Israel, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu<\/a> himself has threatened to revoke their citizenship. The anonymization of sources has been one of the more contested issues; Israel supporters have said it discredits the soldiers\u2019 testimony, while Palestine supporters have criticized the film for shielding self-confessed war criminals.<\/p>\n Without the promise of anonymity, of course, NAZA as a film wouldn\u2019t exist. But the reporting that it presents would exist. Much of it has already been published in outlets including +972 Magazine<\/a>, an Israeli-Palestinian publication; Local Call, a Hebrew-language outlet; and The Guardian, which co-produced the film. Abraham wrote many of those investigative pieces himself; he\u2019s also credited the many Palestinian journalists who brought these revelations to light.<\/p>\n The testimony is riveting. Some of the interview subjects speak about how they were motivated to help the Israeli military annihilate Hamas after Oct. 7<\/a>. Some express guilt and regret for their involvement. Others see themselves as cogs in a necessary war machine. But for the most part, the filmmakers are less interested in the questions of why than in the mechanics of how. They want us to understand how these systems of remote surveillance and mass killing work, and to grasp the horrific scale of the civilian deaths.<\/p>\n NAZA is an acronym for nezek agavi, Hebrew for \u201ccollateral damage.\u201d It refers to the estimated number of civilian casualties considered acceptable by the Israeli military. \u201cTwenty NAZA\u201d would mean that up to 20 civilian deaths were approved in the elimination of a single target. For one high-value target, a figure of 500 NAZA was approved \u2014 the population of a small Israeli town, Abraham notes.<\/p>\n The logistics of trackings and killings are calmly and methodically laid out. Because the military can hack into any Palestinian\u2019s phone in Gaza, their power of surveillance is near-total. We learn about the military\u2019s practice of bombing the homes of suspected Hamas operatives at night, while their wives and children were with them. We also hear about the widespread use of AI systems to gather intelligence<\/a>, much of it faulty, about potential targets.<\/p>\n One of the most chilling passages describes a tracking technology referred to as \u201cWhere\u2019s Daddy?,\u201d which uses children\u2019s words to confirm whether their targeted fathers are at home. One soldier talks about having used this method on a 12-year-old girl, saying, \u201cYou hack her phone and then you kill her.\u201d At one point, Abraham asks a subject if Israel is committing a genocide. Without hesitating, he responds, \u201cYes. Completely.\u201d As the film notes, more than 73,000 Palestinians<\/a> have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7 \u2014 and the death toll continues to rise.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve watched NAZA twice now, both times in a state of quiet horror and fury \u2014 and with enormous admiration for Abraham and Szor\u2019s courage in holding their government to account. My admiration extends to the unerring precision of their filmmaking. NAZA runs just 77 minutes. It doesn\u2019t linger on the atrocities it describes, mainly because there are so many of them to address. There\u2019s some archival material, including footage from the early days of Israeli intelligence and the building of Tel Aviv in the 1920s.<\/p>\n But most of the imagery we see is of modern-day Tel Aviv at night. Szor\u2019s camera captures the glittering lights of the city and often peers into apartment windows, showing us Israeli citizens working out, eating meals and watching the news. There\u2019s tremendous power \u2014 and, I think, a stealthy indictment \u2014 in these everyday images. It\u2019s as if the filmmakers are holding up a mirror image to Gaza, turning our thoughts toward the thousands of slain Palestinians who were, once upon a time, also just going about their evenings. The most radical thing about NAZA isn\u2019t that it exposes the machinery of death; it\u2019s the film\u2019s insistence on the value of Palestinian life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Much of the documentary NAZA is filmed on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, where Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":634591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46,286654],"class_list":["post-634590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies-culture-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}