“What is NAZA?” asks Israeli investigative journalist Yuval Abraham on a dark Tel Aviv rooftop.
“Collateral damage. The number of civilians who will die from a strike,” replies an anonymous Israeli intelligence officer, their face and voice digitally altered to conceal their identity.
Through testimonies from 24 Israeli military personnel, the Guardian-produced documentary NAZA (2026) exposes how artificial intelligence and surveillance technologies have been used to target Gazans en masse following 7 October 2023. The title is a devastating indictment of the mass killing of civilians. Women, children, and even babies are systemically dehumanised, each counting as a single Naza. Unlimited numbers of Naza could be killed in a strike targeting just one alleged Hamas operative. In one instance, the authorised number reached 500. One officer described feeling like “God.” Another compared the remote, large-scale killing to playing a “video game.”
Among the documentary’s most horrifying revelations is “Where’s Daddy?,” an AI-driven targeting system that tracked phones belonging to family members of suspected Hamas operatives. One intelligence officer recounted hacking the phone of a 12-year-old Palestinian girl to alert the military when her father returned. An airstrike was then launched against the family’s home.
“You hack her phone, and then you kill her,” he says.
Recalling school trips to Holocaust concentration camps in Poland, one officer questioned how Germans could live with themselves after the atrocities. Confronted with the destruction he inflicted upon Gaza, he asks: “I still see those Nazis as evil, but what does that mean I am?”
Whilst viewers might anticipate graphic scenes of violence, Abraham and co-director Rachel Szor juxtapose these testimonies with the eerie normality of night in Tel Aviv, just 60 kilometres from Gaza. Israelis watch television and prepare for the evening, while Gaza remains unseen. This lens penetrates the most intimate layers of Israeli society and nationhood, demanding absolute moral reckoning.
Only in the final shot do we see a bereaved man in Gaza crawling through rubble, desperately searching for his wife and son. The IDF has dismissed the documentary as “distorted, misleading and disingenuous,” and its directors have been denounced as traitors and have received death threats. NAZA is profoundly disturbing and demands urgent viewing. It is all the more powerful coming from within.
Photo by Ahmed Abu Hameeda on Unsplash
