NAZA, which won a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival Saturday night, is already one of the most shocking and controversial documentaries of the year. It may also prove to be one of the most indispensable.

The exposé, from Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, features testimony from 24 Israeli military officers outlining the systems and protocols they allege Israel uses to target and kill civilians in Gaza. The film’s title, NAZA, comes from an acronym the Israeli military uses as a shorthand for civilian casualties.

Abraham and Szor, part of the director collective behind the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, which documented the destruction of a village in the occupied West Bank by Israeli soldiers and settlers, shot NAZA clandestinely over three years, doing the interviews under the cover of night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv. The duo used VFX to alter the voices and faces of the officers.

Their allegations and revelations are harrowing. One describes hacking into the phone of a 12-year-old girl to identify when her father, a target, comes home, and ordering the bombing that kills the whole family. Another describes how snipers gun down Palestinian civilians as they desperately scramble to reach a food distribution site.

NAZA was enthusiastically received in Venice with a 25-minute standing ovation, an all-time record. Jonathan Glazer, the Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest, executive produced the film. Mk2 Films is handling worldwide sales.

In a statement, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said it “categorically rejects” the film’s allegations and criticized the use of anonymous testimonies, which it said “cannot be verified.” It repeated claims that “the IDF strikes military targets and makes unprecedented efforts to minimize harm to civilians.”

Abraham and Szor spoke to The Hollywood Reporter on the making of the film, fighting the “complicity of silence” and whether their film can bring about real-world change. “Because this is not something of the past. It’s still ongoing.”

The film builds on investigative work you did with The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call between 2023 and 2025. How did that collaboration come about?

Yuval Abraham: The film is built on investigative work that I’ve done together with colleagues at The Guardian, like Harry Davies and Emma Graham-Harrison and others, who — we’ve been looking at the way the Israeli targeting systems work, Israeli mass surveillance over Palestinians, and how mass killing works. And me and Rachel, of course, we worked on No Other Land together with Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, and we realized that we wanted to make a film that is in this intersection between cinema and journalism. I think a film allows us to examine the system, the systemic nature of the killing in Gaza — and we knew that we wanted to have a very rigorous process of journalism, of fact-checking, of scrutinizing the work that we were doing, and The Guardian and The Guardian‘s investigations desk were very valuable in that sense, to partner with us on this.

How did you find these 24 officers who speak to you so openly in the documentary, and how did you convince them to speak?

Abraham: It was a process. It took months, and in some instances years, to find people and to speak with them. For some of them, it took a long time until they decided to agree to speak in front of a camera. I think people were aware that what they are exposing is quite damning information on the Israeli state crimes that were perpetrated in Gaza.

And if you think about the fact that Israel, to this day, is not letting international journalists enter Gaza to witness what human rights organizations across the world are calling a genocide — much of the burden is placed on Palestinian journalists, who have been killed. You know, 200 of them have been killed. So I think it’s obviously for this reason that people were afraid, because it’s clear that the Israeli government is trying to block these attempts at accountability, whether it’s through assassinating and killing Palestinian journalists or through other means, by preventing international journalists from coming in.

So it was a challenge, but ultimately, when you’re an investigative journalist, you build a network of sources. You move from one person to the next. You have to be patient sometimes and let people make up their own minds. It was important for us that the people participating give their informed consent, and we knew that we would have to rely on a large group of sources — because this film is making quite heavy claims about how Israel’s system of targeting works, about the fact that attacking civilian spaces, family homes, is something that is built into the system by design. It’s looking for targets when they come back to their homes.

The fact that there were protocols that soldiers operated by, of shooting and killing anybody they saw on the ground in large areas, including women and children — I don’t know if this was a written protocol, but many, many soldiers said that this was the logic they were operating by. So to credibly make those claims in a documentary, we knew we would need many sources. So this is why we also had to get two dozen of them for this film.

The other thing that I would want to add is that I think these policies, and the truth of these policies, should have been evident without relying on Israeli soldiers. Palestinians have been documenting this on the ground from the very first day. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that when children come into hospitals with sniper wounds, and Palestinians are documenting it, that they’re being intentionally shot by soldiers. Between May and late October 2025, Palestinians were documenting massacre after massacre happening at the food sites, the GHF sites — you didn’t have to wait for the soldiers who appear in our film, describing how they would see snipers shooting at unarmed civilians running toward food in front of the camera, to know that this is true.

That truth should have been evident from the very start, and I think, because so many people — especially Israelis, and people in the United States and in Germany and other places — are still denying those crimes, and because the denial of those crimes allows them to persist, we felt it was important to also bring insider testimony from the people who design those systems, from the people who operated those systems. Because it’s ongoing. It’s not something of the past. It’s something that’s very much rooted in the present, and we hope will not continue more and more into the future.

What did the people who agreed to speak with you say were their reasons for doing so?

Rachel Szor: In the film there are 24 different people speaking, so there’s a range of reasons why people want to speak. We also talked about it between ourselves: what is their motive to come to us? The film touches on it a bit. There are some people that perhaps feel some sort of responsibility, and they also wanted to speak about it in Hebrew so that more Israelis will hear about it. Some people in the film, you see, feel some sort of pride [in what they did]. We don’t really know what the psychological reasons are. I feel that perhaps it’s also because not many people are asking these questions. In Israel, in the mainstream media, no one really talks about it. There are a few journalists who investigate those things, but no one really gives those soldiers the stage. It’s really like a secret topic, especially the intelligence around it, no one really talks about it. So it was kind of the first time they could speak about it was when they spoke about it with Yuval. The film is less about trying to solve the question of why they spoke out, or how Yuval got to them; it’s really more about them describing the systems they use for the mass killing.

How did Jonathan Glazer get involved in this project as an executive producer?

Abraham: We met Jonathan for the first time with No Other Land. He hosted a Q&A, and we connected afterward. We were really influenced by The Zone of Interest. I remember hearing Jonathan say that in that film, the victims were out of sight, but they were never out of mind for a second. That really, I think, informed how we were thinking of the cinematic language and the way we structured NAZA — the fact that we are looking at an Israeli city, Tel Aviv, we are looking at Israelis involved in mass killings, and the victims, for most of the film, are out of sight. But they’re never out of mind, in the sense that the reason for being of this film is the crimes committed against the Palestinians in Gaza. This was our motivation, and this is also what we were interested in exploring — how those systems look, and what allows people to participate in them.

You’ve both been investigating these types of crimes for some time, in different forms, including with your last film. Was there anything surprising or shocking for you that came out of these interviews and this investigation?

Abraham: I’m not sure if it was surprising, again, because the truth of what is happening in Gaza could have been evident, and should have been evident, from the start. If you listen to the openly genocidal statements of Israeli ministers, senior figures in the government, senior military officials — I mean, just recently, our defense minister, Israel Katz, said that the only solution for Gaza is migration, and the government is ready to do it by air, by land, or by sea, in any way possible. This kind of rhetoric makes clear that the intent is the removal of Palestinians, and the dehumanization has been on the table.

It could have been clear from the start, if people listened to Palestinians, to civilians in Gaza, to journalists who have been documenting it. So I can’t say there was a surprise at the revelations in the film. I think what was striking was hearing how much these tools are already built on a logic that is extremely deadly for civilians.

We look at one kind of protocol of operation, a tool called Where’s Daddy, which is a system that, by spying on family members of people the Israeli military wants to kill, waits until a family member says the person is home, and the system is built on bombing those individuals when they are in their family homes, when they are sleeping, at night. What was really striking about this to me is that you so often hear the way the international media and the Israeli media frame this killing as ‘okay, we are bombing them because Hamas is using them as human shields.’ You imagine that Hamas is firing rockets out of those civilian houses, and this is why they are bombed. And we have soldiers in our film saying Hamas uses human shields in some cases, but the majority of the killing — this mass slaughter of civilians inside their homes — is not because the homes are used as human shields. It’s because this is how the Israeli targeting system is built. It’s because the goal — a genocidal goal, in my mind, from the start — was to destroy these so-called targets, with AI involved in selecting those targets, and that civilian spaces are routinely bombed by design.

These are practices and methods that existed already before the massacre of October 7, but afterward they were applied and pushed to such an extreme that the inevitable, pre-calculated, premeditated results are, as we know, that more than 2,900 families in Gaza, multiple generations, were just completely erased, all the members of the family murdered. This was part of the logic of how the Israeli system operated.

What was it like, personally, to conduct these interviews with people admitting to war crimes?

Abraham: Yeah, it’s a challenge, because I know that as an interviewer, you don’t really need to push the person talking in order to get to the truth. All you have to ask, really, once the person is sitting in front of you, is: describe to me what you did, how did systems work? Because the truth of what happened in Gaza is so horrible, just asking is sometimes enough.

I actually think you need to use quite a lot of manipulation if you want to obscure that truth, if you want to reframe it in a way where it is not clear — that is the difficult task. The film is based on more than 100 hours of interview material, and every story or claim that is made in the film is something that we heard again and again, from multiple people and multiple sources. I felt it was important to interview them in that way so that the audience feels this film is as factual, as objective as possible, because it is also some kind of document. Of course, we have our personal opinions. We’ve made them clear. But I know that the people I want to reach, the people who need to change, the people whose silence or complicity is allowing the crimes to persist, are maybe people who don’t agree with my conclusions.

There are Israeli elections coming up — do you expect this film and its revelations to affect the debate, or even the result of the elections?

Szor: Yeah, we really don’t know. Of course, we hope that it will be shown in Israel and will have as much influence as possible. But unfortunately, in this election, what’s happening in Gaza — still ongoing every week — and what’s happening in the West Bank is just not a topic, an issue, in the elections. So it’s a big question for us as well, how the film will be received in Israel. But we hope that the fact that it’s soldiers from the system speaking in Hebrew will perhaps have some sort of influence.

Will it be released in Israel? Do you have a distributor there?

Abraham: We don’t have a distributor yet, but it’s definitely our intention to release it as widely as possible in Israel, and in the United States, and in Germany. As I said, I think it’s our responsibility — we are Israelis, we come from that society, and we are citizens of the country that is committing these grave crimes, and we want to confront that, and show and share this with people from the place we come from, and also around the world. We will try. We can’t know if there will be mainstream platforms in Israel, but we want to take this film there. I think it’s definitely important for us, because I feel it’s our responsibility to do this work.

Your last film No Other Land had difficulty getting distributed in the U.S. and other territories. Do you expect similar resistance from mainstream distributors with this film?

Abraham: I don’t know — it’s kind of too early to tell. My gut tells me, and I hope I’m wrong on this, that it will be just as difficult. I know there are important public opinion changes in the United States. I think there will be a big audience for this film, especially in the United States, since the killing was carried out with weapons that were created in the U.S., funded by U.S. taxpayer money — $21.7 billion worth of arms and equipment sent to Israel since October 7, which is still being carried out. Just this week, a seven-year-old girl in Gaza was killed with her father in her car. This is all being done thanks to the support of the United States, and the refusal of consecutive U.S. governments to condition or suspend completely the arms they send to Israel. So it’s so important for us that people in the United States really listen to the Israeli officers and soldiers describing how their weapons were used. And I hope there will be a mainstream distributor that takes this film and carries it into the United States. I don’t know that it’s going to happen, but I hope it will.

More generally, what level of risk is there — for you, and for the people who participated in this film — of being prosecuted or targeted by the Israeli government because of these revelations?

Abraham: There is someone in the film who says they want to hide their identity because they are afraid of retaliation and imprisonment by the Israeli government. Israel’s government is a far-right government, and we know that they are not letting international journalists into Gaza, and they’ve killed so many Palestinian journalists there. So it’s clear there is an intent to obscure or hide the truth, and there’s something about that truth appearing through the voices of people inside that system that I’m guessing the state will be very unhappy about, and will try to block from coming out. But at the same time, I can speak for myself and Rachel — I think there is nothing wrong in what we are doing. I think it’s what we should be doing as journalists, and what we should be doing as humans, and as citizens of a country that is committing such crimes. So I hope that we will not have to pay a certain kind of price for it.

Given the backlash you faced after your last film, and given that Gaza and the occupied territories aren’t playing a major role in this election, does that discourage you?

Rachel Szor: I think the question is less about the backlash and more about the impact. With No Other Land, we won the Oscar, as a collective, and it’s the biggest award you can get, and we felt so many people watched it — but still, this week, two villages were destroyed in a-Safai al-Tahta, and that’s exactly what the film was about — this policy of removing and destroying the houses of Palestinians in that area — and it’s still happening. So, in a way, you ask yourself what kind of impact it can have. But so many people, greater than us, are doing things, and you’re never sure what impact it will have. We have this privilege as Israelis to bring these testimonies in the film. It was less a question of whether we despair or not and more the feeling that we have to do it.

Yuval Abraham: I think Rachel and I think realize we are operating in a system of Jewish-Israeli supremacy and privilege. When our Palestinian journalist colleagues in Gaza are really paying with their lives — so many have been killed and murdered by Israel for documenting what is happening around them — to me, it’s clear that there is an importance to documentation. In our film, No Other Land, Basel is still continuing to document what was happening to his community. He says that change can sometimes be like water dropping — drop after drop after drop — and eventually there will be a change. We hope so. For me, I think a lot of this change has to start with a change in U.S. foreign policy, and I hope that the film can contribute to that somehow.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.