As the credits for NAZA rolled after its debut on September 10 at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, the audience at the Palazzo del Cinema responded with a record breaking 25-minute standing ovation. Days later, NAZA’s Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor were awarded the festival’s prestigious Special Jury Prize.
Read more Is ‘Trumpism’ to Blame for the ‘Cornell 7’ Circus?
The 80-minute narrative documentary, produced by the Guardian, has since become a hot topic of criticism for its controversial portray of Israel’s war in Gaza. The filmmakers of NAZA — the Israeli military acronym for “collateral damage” — assert that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) carried out strike orders in Gaza based on AI target identification while willingly accepting high numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties. The IDF’s AI data system Lavender, used to identify Hamas personnel, was portrayed as generating and commanding target strikes irrespective of the non-Hamas Palestinian collateral. The film’s thesis was built upon the foundational testimony of one interviewee who claimed that the IDF had planned a strike on a single Hamas operative with the anticipation of 500 civilian deaths.
The film’s narrative is driven by 24 interviewees presented as anonymous Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel who claimed to have been involved in these mass killings. Filmed at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv buildings, the ominously charged and shadowy atmosphere is enhanced by the silhouettes of interviewees speaking with digitally distorted voices.
The film’s New York premiere on September 30 received another standing ovation, and a global theatrical release is planned for more than 50 countries followed by a digital release through the Guardian. The film’s handling of the Gaza war has provoked critical responses down the political aisle. Detractors on the left who support claims that the IDF has conducted systematized genocide and famine in the Gaza Strip have rallied to defend the filmmakers’ position. The political right, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration, have accused the filmmakers of national defamation and smearing the Israeli military.
The filmmakers’ journalistic integrity and the validity of their claims however were further called into question after the IDF published a 10-page response to the film on October 1. Requests previously made by the IDF to the filmmakers to submit their claims and provide them with a pre-release copy of the film for review were denied. The published evaluation relied on accounts from military representatives who attended public screenings of the film and media reports. The IDF spokesperson concluded that the filmmakers presented a “distorted, misleading, and unrealistic picture” of how the military assesses and selects targets for operational strikes.
The IDF report immediately refuted the film’s foundational claim, that one Hamas operative warranted 500 deaths, stating that the military “never planned, approved, or carried out a strike in Gaza in which 500 civilians or anything near that number were anticipated to be killed.” The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health also never claimed that hundreds of civilians were killed in a single strike during the war. Further criticism on the film’s journalistic integrity points to gross misinformation on the military’s use of AI systems, an apparent absence of high-level interviewees, and an overall lack of context for the war in Gaza.
The film’s claim that Lavender, and other AI tools, generated targets for strike orders irrespective of civilian collateral failed to accurately distinguish AI systems with operational protocols. Lavender is a “general-purpose database that organizes and cross-references layers of existing intelligence sources… to help efficiently organize and connect data points related to operations in terror organizations,” according to the IDF. AI systems such as this assist in data collection and processing for intelligence officers to identify targets and for operational commanders to make responsible strike decisions. Lavender is not a list of targets automatically preapproved for strikes, as the film presumed, and does not give orders that are blindly carried out.
Israeli officials have acknowledged that the IDF loosened its rules of engagement in the immediate wake of October 7, allowing strikes that risked more civilian collateral than previously permitted. The rules of engagement were soon restrained after November 5, 2023, and by January of the following year all subsequent strikes required special permission after cross-examination by intelligence and operational commanders. Authorized strike orders made by operational commanders are also not calculated based on predetermined civilian casualty thresholds, as the film claims, but on the priority of the target.
Read more Iran’s Sleeper Cells Come Awake
The film failed to acknowledge the multi-layered process of assessing and selecting targets and the pre-strike text messages, leaflets, and radio broadcasts alerting the civilian population in Gaza of the time and location of impending strikes.
Also missing from the film are the commanding authorities and legal experts who can speak to the IDF’s operations and the rules governing anticipated civilian harm. The 24 anonymous interviewees, according to the IDF report, may have carried out orders on the ground or assessed data, but would have only had limited exposure, or no exposure at all, to the higher-level intelligence gathering or tactical decisions for ordering targeted strikes. High-ranking officers privy to this knowledge were not included in the film. Also absent are the multi-layered protocols and legal advisors involved in minimizing civilian casualties for every strike. The film therefore presented the personal testimonies from those not directly involved in or knowledgeable of high-stakes decision making as operational facts.
An overall lack of context for the war in Gaza also overshadows the film’s narrative. An important and often overlooked condition of the IDF’s campaign in Gaza is the fact that Hamas does not follow international laws of war requiring uniformed combatants to distinguish themselves from civilians. Rather, Hamas embeds militants, arsenals, and command centers among the Palestinian civilian population to raise civilian collateral numbers as a strategic tactic to smear the IDF’s international reputation. A film exposing Hamas’s violations of international law and human rights would serve the cinema-going public better than one that smears the IDF’s delicate navigation of Hamas’s illegal tactics and stretches testimonies to fit a narrative of civilian genocide. In most all accounts, the interviewee’s testimonies concerning incidents resulting in civilian deaths lack basic journalistic information that would allow the allegations to be independently verified, such as the date, time, location, or the names of the targets.
Heightening the lack of context is the film’s lack of editorial integrity. The digitalized voice makeovers of the interviewees not only make their testimonies hard to follow, but strip them of any credible individuality. According to Emanuel Fabian and Nurit Yohanan at the Times of Israel, the English subtitles are also writhe with, perhaps intentional, mistakes. One interviewee commented about a house where “Ahmad and his entire family” reside, but the subtitles read “Ahmad and his entire family will die.” The foundational claim of the film rests on the testimony of a soldier who said “There was an approval of, like, 500 for a single person,” while the subtitles read “There was approval once to kill 500 for one human target.”
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor try to argue that the IDF’s assessment of civilian casualties prior to target selection is an indication of their indifference to civilian life and that they carry out strikes regardless of any collateral threshold. The argument, however, can be turned on its head in light of the film’s inaccurate reporting. Estimating possible civilian casualties is required when assessing proportionality under international law, and what the film failed to acknowledge were the repeatedly delayed or altered strikes based on civilian thresholds or the need for additional intelligence. “In other words,” according to David Lange, “NAZA takes the very existence of a system designed to assess potential collateral damage and presents it as evidence of something sinister.”
Untangling the complexity of the war in Gaza requires more than interviews with 24 anonymous, mid-level military personnel. The film’s reporting is reminiscent of the anti-Israel op-eds published by Nicholas Kristof for the New York Times where unverifiable testimonies from hand-selected interviewees are presented as hard facts deserving of standing ovations. The horrifying and undeniable truth to this story is that tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have died in Gaza since Hamas initiated war with Israel on October 7 (73,000 according to the Gaza ministry of health, 50,000 according to the IDF). Understanding how they died is deserving of honest reporting.
Read more The Spectator P.M. Ep. 475: Poor Baby Born by ‘Surrogate’ Searches for His Mother
About the Author
