The best way to understand Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s controversial documentary NAZA, which examines the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, is to start with its title.
NAZA is a term reportedly used within Israeli military and intelligence circles as shorthand for human collateral damage. Like so much of what the 24 anonymous operatives describe from behind the shadows in backlit rooftop interviews through the cloak of anonymity, it’s a way of stripping humanity from the people caught up in missile strikes. Reducing human lives to numbers on a spreadsheet. Shot in 2023 and now making the festival rounds, where I caught it at the Philadelphia Film Festival, NAZA is terrifying precisely because of how casually its subjects discuss the unthinkable. Change the language, reduce people to statistics, and the systematic killing of Palestinians starts to sound like just another day at the office, or a video game.
Since the film’s release, both Israeli filmmakers have reportedly been denounced as traitors in Israel, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has allegedly threatened to revoke their citizenship. After watching the documentary, it’s not difficult to understand why it has generated such a reaction. This is a film about the machinery of modern warfare, but more importantly, it’s about what happens when that machinery makes the human cost easier to ignore.
After establishing the context of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, which killed around 1,200 people and saw approximately 250 taken hostage, the film examines how Israel developed a technological infrastructure in Palestinian territories that could be leveraged for surveillance and, eventually, targeting. As someone who works in tech, I found it chilling to hear drone operators describe how they plan strikes and how the acceptable level of NAZA – human collateral damage – could reportedly climb as high as 500 people, depending on the importance of the target. When individual targets proved difficult to track, operatives describe decisions to strike residential homes at night, when those targets were more likely to be with their families.
The result was the deaths of entire households, sometimes wiping out entire floors of a building, while an operative listened in through a target’s device to confirm the kill.
The moment that really broke me was the discussion of Lavender, the AI-assisted system reportedly used by the Israeli military to identify potential targets. According to the operatives interviewed in the film, the sheer volume of potential targets made it impractical for humans to research and assess everyone individually, so an algorithm was brought in to do much of the heavy lifting. By analyzing data points such as cell phone locations and patterns of association, including messages, geolocation and calls, the system assigns scores based on how likely someone is to be affiliated with Hamas. Reach a certain threshold, and a person can be flagged as a target.
The operatives also discuss the possibility of people being wrongly flagged simply because they work in places where Hamas members are concentrated or have associations that trigger the system. According to their accounts, the margin for that kind of error was deemed acceptable, effectively treating the possibility of killing an innocent person as another cost of doing business.
And that’s where the film’s central horror really comes into focus: when human lives become data points, the possibility of a mistake stops being an obstacle and becomes just another number to factor into the equation. Some operatives even describe what sounds like the gamification of warfare, admitting to a sense of elation after a successful strike, as though they’d just won a video game.
Not everyone interviewed seems able to compartmentalize their involvement so easily. Some subjects appear genuinely shaken by their participation, while others remain stoic, hiding behind the numbers and the logic of the system. In one particularly chilling comparison, an operative invokes the familiar defense of Nazi perpetrators who claimed they were simply following orders. It’s a disturbing parallel, but one that speaks to the film’s larger question: how do people reconcile their participation in something horrific when the system around them has made it feel ordinary, necessary, or even justified?
The filmmakers wisely allow the subjects’ own words and accounts to carry the weight of the revelations. There’s no need to overstate what we’re hearing. The film also explores the machinery of containment and deniability, and the role these strategies play in shaping the narrative presented to the public and the rest of the world. How long can a government control the story, obscure the human cost, and maintain a version of events that serves its interests? NAZA suggests that technology is only one part of that equation. Language, secrecy, and the ability to manufacture distance from the consequences are just as important.
NAZA is shocking, essential, and genuinely horrifying. What makes it so difficult to watch isn’t just the possibility of what has happened, but the knowledge that the devastation in Gaza continues. Given the state of the world, that may not be surprising, but it’s no less devastating. As awareness grows and the narrative surrounding Gaza continues to shift, the human toll remains staggering. The death and injury figures cited in discussions of the conflict are estimates that change over time, but behind every number are people whose lives have been destroyed, families torn apart, and entire communities left to reckon with unimaginable loss.
These aren’t simply statistics in a military calculation. They’re human beings. And when the machinery of war can reduce them to acceptable losses, when algorithms help determine who lives and who dies, and when the people carrying out those decisions can describe the results with the detachment of someone checking off a task, NAZA forces us to confront a truly terrifying reality: what happens when a system becomes so efficient at killing that it no longer has to confront the humanity of the people it kills?
