The Israeli Film Directors Pushing for a Reckoning in Their Home Country

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. The special jury prize goes to Naza, Bayoval Abraham and Rachel Sazor. Documentary Naza received widespread acclaim when a premiered last month at the Venice Film Festival. The won a top prize and it got a record-breaking standing ovation for 25 minutes. But reception for the film in Israel could not be more different. The two Israeli directors are being accused of damaging Israel's reputation in the world and of betraying their own country. The two Israeli directors are being accused of damaging Israel's reputation in the world and betraying their own country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he proposed legislation that could revoke the filmmaker's citizenship. All of this, despite the fact that the film has not been released in Israel. Naza investigates the methods that the Israeli army used in Gaza. In the aftermath of the Hamaslet attacks on October 7th. The film features testimony from 24 anonymous military intelligence officers and soldiers. Both the military policies that led to the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and their partner. The Israeli military pushed back on the film, saying that it misrepresents its efforts to avoid harming civilians. And so today, we speak to the directors of Naza, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Shore about their film and about how they're pushing for a reckoning in their home country. It's Monday, October 12th. Rachel Shore, Yuval Abraham, welcome to the daily. Thank you. Thank you. I think it's sort of fair to say that the two of you are experiencing some extremes. Your film, Naza, got a standing ovation. Actually, it was a record-breaking standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. And at the same time, the film, even though most Israelis have not seen it because it hasn't been released there, has inspired a lot of anger back in Israel. Rachel, for example, I understand that there have been protesters outside of your family's house. Yeah. So I just want to ask you guys both just how you're doing, how you're feeling in this moment. Yeah, it's been intense. The response has been very aggressive towards the film. You know, the demonstrations next to my parents' house were calling to hang us, like a lot, a lot of violence towards us. But I think we also feel that it at least also creates some sort of conversation about what we have done in doing in Gaza. Because for the last three years, there hasn't been any conversation about this. And just to say that we made this film in Hebrew with testimonies of the soldiers because we want to reach the Israeli society. Yeah, I agree. I mean, that's what I try to hold on to as some kind of meaning in all of this that in Israel was saying, in the conversations that have now been sparked as a result of the film. And I think, you know, part of the reason why we made this film is to try to make sense of the extremely large number of civilians that were killed by our country, by Israel in Gaza. But yeah, it's not an easy situation. I mean, we want to go back home to Israel, which is our home, but we can't go back to Netanyahu just a few days ago said that our film is like a ballistic missiles being targeted at Israel. I mean, there's a total atmosphere of incitement. The death threats have been so many that people who love us, like our parents, our friends, everyone is telling us, don't come back. Like, it's not, it's not safe for you right now to go back. I want to talk about the film that has inspired all of this now. The premise of the film, the way you actually made it is actually kind of simple. It's you, you've all on rooftops in Tel Aviv at night talking to 24 different Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers about the war in Gaza. And the conversations, if I may, seem to be really about two things. On the one hand, they are about the casualties, the civilian casualties in Gaza and the tools that the IDF uses such as AI and master of aliens. But the film is also very much about how these folks that are talking to you are explaining and justifying what they have done both to you and also it feels like to themselves. And I think it'll be helpful if we can start with perhaps you've all explaining the title of this film, which is Gaza. Can you just walk us through what Gaza means? Gaza stands for Nezak Agavie. These are two words in Hebrew that can be translated as collateral damage in English or incidental damage. The way in which Israeli intelligence officers use this term is to indicate the number of civilians that they expect will be harmed at a particular air strike. It's like a euphemism as a substitute for saying human beings. So if an air strike has an anticipated number of 15 civilian casualties, meaning 15, you know, women, men, children who are not the target of the strike, but the army knows it will likely kill them or harm them. And they use the word nasa, they use this word collateral damage so they won't say 15 men women should be say 15 nasa or 20 nasa. The word as you mentioned is euphemistic and we're going to get into what points your film makes about that word. I want to just talk first about the people in the movie. Can you just tell us a little bit more about who these 24 people are and the roles that they played. Of course, so these are 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, all of whom were involved in either the mass surveillance or the remote killing of Palestinians in Gaza. They have varying roles like different degrees of seniority and different roles within the army. Most of them belong to the so called Israeli intelligence community. Just be very clear. These are not folks who are mostly in Gaza. These are folks who are operating for the military from within Israel. And these are individuals who generally speaking come from upper middle upper class, relatively good education. Many of them are secular. They don't necessarily belong to the kind of families who would vote for Netanyahu or for Ben Gveel or for Smotrich. Ben Gveer and Smotrich of course are right wing Israeli politicians just to say. Absolutely. So these are individuals who are part of Israel's liberal elites. That is the kind of profile I would say of the people who are doing this remote surveillance and remote killing. And a lot of these soldiers officers are considered leftist and you can connect it to Tel Aviv, which is a city that is considered as the liberal capital of Israel. And as you see in the film actually in the heart of the city there is the main headquarters of the army. So some of these operations are actually being operated from there. And Tel Aviv is only 40 miles away from Gaza. But you can almost not tell that these things are happening from that city. I want to get to the revelations in the film. So let's talk about what the film actually revealed what these conversations revealed to you about how the Israeli army targeted members of Hamas in Gaza after the October 7th attacks on Israelis by Hamas. Well, it's a film packed with revelations, but I think one is the way in which the targeting systems that were used by Israeli intelligence to look for these Hamas members specifically looked for them inside private houses. And you know, when you want to bomb so many targets, houses are a very convenient place because people come back home to sleep in their house. One officer describes a system called "Where is Daddy?" Which spied on the family members of these targets through mass surveillance technology and waited to get signals or alerts that they are coming back to their houses. And it's important to note these are not houses where military activity had to be taking place on the contrary. So it was much more difficult to find Hamas members when they were engaged in military activity or even when they were just walking around. There was something about waiting for the individual to come home when they are sleeping at night, which was just easier. And to meet this decision to bomb people in their houses is part of the reason why we saw thousands of Palestinian families being just killed, wiped out multiple generations, the babies, the toddlers, the children, the women, the majority of them were killed inside residential buildings. The reason why I think this moment stood out to me, this particular revelation was because it sort of complicated the narrative that you often hear from Israel that Hamas uses human shields and operates out of civilian infrastructure like hospitals and schools for instance. And your film does not dispute that, just to be very. clear. But the point that it is making is that the IDF targeted people in their homes because that is where they could find them. You know, they would go home and put their cell phone next to their bed. And if the IDF was tracking the cell phone, then it would know where this person was. And it was not necessarily, as you said, because Hamas was operating out of that house. And so targeting the person in their house often meant killing a person's family. And in that way, it complicates Hamas using human shields. Yes. These buildings were not being bombed because there was Hamas military activity happening from those buildings. So it wasn't as if someone was, you know, launching rockets or a sniper sitting on the roof. It's just easy to get them in their houses. They go home to sleep. And we designed a system predicated on mass surveillance that routinely and systematically on a massive scale marks those places, those private houses as a target. And you know, we have this image of an intelligence officer sitting looking at the screen with air conditioner in the room and naturally knowing what they're doing. But they actually opening the phone of the targets or actually also of their family members. They can hear what's happening inside the house. One of the soldiers described, they would actually hear what's happening before. And then also what's happening after they bombed. They would hear a conversation between a couple, a baby crying. Were you surprised at that level of surveillance, at that level of sort of intimacy that the film claims to be happening? Yeah, I think it was, it was surprising because it kind of breaks this image that you have of how much the soldiers know before and after they bombed the families. The film makes some claims about how the Israeli military uses AI. You've all, you have been writing about the war since it began as a journalist. You were among the first journalists to write about the use of AI. And I wonder, you've all, if you just want to explain that a little bit. Yes. So the way it worked according to sources that we've spoken with is that the army had a group of individuals that they believed were part of the Hamas military wing. And then they had a machine learning algorithm that kind of learned the way in which the phones of these individuals behaved and identified identifying features. So it could be, for example, other people are saving them on their contact lists as Hamas members. Or these are phones that are often in the vicinity of Hamas training compounds. Or these are phones that repeatedly change their phone number because that's how militants may operate. And then it scans the phones of almost every single person in Gaza who has a phone. And it gave them a rating based on how similar their phone patterns were to that existing group of people who were identified as, as Hamas and PHA members by Israeli intelligence. And what sources tell us in the film is that this AI based list of Hamas members in certain areas of the military was used without needing to verify it further. So it was used as like a soul incriminator, even though the people designing it and the military knew that it had an error rate. But, you know, to me, the main issue here with AI is not the mistakes. I think the main issue with AI is the scale that it enables. When you have AI that can just mark, you know, 10th of thousands of so-called targets, junior targets, that's nobody in the army probably even remembers what their names are. And instead of spending, you know, an hour in order to bomb one house, you can designate dozens of houses for bombing with little human involvement. One of the claims in the movie that has gotten a lot of attention and criticism is this claim for one officer in particular that one strike on a Hamas target was approved with the knowledge that as many as 500 civilians could be killed or injured. The Times has reported, before my colleagues here at the paper, have reported on how these really military has loosened its restrictions on how many civilians can be endangered in a specific attack. And we have reported that in certain instances approval has been given to kill or injure more than 100 people. But 500, as stated in your film by this one person, goes farther than what the New York Times has reported. It's also some things that the IDF we should note has specifically disputed. And I just want to understand from you both, how did you corroborate that specific claim from this person? This is a film that was done in collaboration with the Guardian, with the investigations of this, the Guardian. We would have not put in this testimony of that soldier if we were not fully confident that it's true. And if we did not have and we do have multiple other sources who have confirms that number. And we also have specificity that we've just not made public yet about when that strike took place, where it took place, we understand it's an explosive claim. And the fact that there is one person into film, speaking about it, it does not mean that it has not been verified by multiple people that we've spoken with. I guess what I'm really getting at is if you did all this work to corroborate such an incendiary claim, if you had other people telling you the same thing, why not put an indication of that homework in the film? Because there are a lot of people that you probably want to reach with this movie who are going to look for any reason to dismiss the claims in this film. And I wonder if you think that like in hindsight, perhaps it just would have helped make people more receptive to what you are trying to tell them. No, I think that the film makes it case very, very convincingly. And the film has a kind of language as well. I mean, there is no narration in the film. I mean, it's also a work of cinema. And as a device, we don't, it doesn't use that, you know, this claim, we have four sources, this claim, which is a very journalistic device that I do use often when I write an investigative story in written text. But all I can say is that we are very confident. Of course, people can always pick and choose what to focus on. Sure, of course. But I think a good faith person who listens to the film should feel that it is bulletproof. And as I said before, the claims that are made in the film are claims that we have verified from multiple sources. You've all, did you go to the IDF with these claims before the film came out before coming out with the movie? We went to the IDF over three years with, we've written, as I said, over a dozen articles about about the Israeli military's firing policies, about the way in which they use technology and surveillance technology. And we went, we approached them for comment every single time. And the film reflects the gist of the IDF and the Israeli government's position with regards to this through Netanyahu. I mean, we juxtaposed, we interweave Netanyahu throughout the film, speaking of defending the Israeli bombing campaign. And we, yeah, that's there. In public statements, the Israeli military has said that the film presents, quote, a distorted misleading and disingenuous picture. It says that the army and its commanders devote, quote, exceptional effort and detail, end quote, into assessing and trying to mitigate harm to civilians while fighting Hamas, including by canceling planned attacks. The military also says that legal advisors review proposed airstrikes to ensure that they comply with international law. Any violations, it says, are investigated. After the break, we speak with you, Val and Rachel, about the psychological impact of the war on the officers and the soldiers who appear in the film. We'll be right back. These officers, at least to me, it felt like they were really grappling with the role that they were playing in the war. And one thing that comes across really strongly is the distance, right? The distance between the people in the film and the actual act of killing. And I wonder if you both feel like one of the reasons why that kind of distance developed or was allowed to develop, at least initially was because of how horrendous the October 7th attacks were, the taking of the hostages, who were not released for a very long time. We know, of course, that created this huge psychological trauma in Israeli society. And I just sort of wonder, like, how that affected the mindset of the people you spoke with when they first entered the war. Yeah, absolutely. Of course, it had a huge effect. It's a huge trauma for Israeli society. The massacre was horrific. There was a lot of anger. There are soldiers in the film saying how they felt after the October 7th attacks and needs to go to the army and needs to do something. Of course, there is a context of trauma. I mean, there are people that I know that were killed and murdered on that day on October 7th. It cannot. It does not justify the raising down of entire cities in Gaza too. the grounds, massacres that have happened again and again at food sites, the shooting on one-arm civilians that are trying to go back to their destroyed neighborhoods, the murder of so many people, like the killing of more than 73,000 people, most of them civilians. And I think, to me, there's always this fine line between context and justification, right? Because context is not justification. Just like we say the same thing about October 7th, it's completely unjustified. Of course, you can talk about context, you can talk about Gaza being under siege, and you can talk about Palestinians living on the Israeli occupation without a state for men, but none of that justifies a massacre of civilians, the killing of people dancing at a party, the kidnapping of children, it's horrific. None of us should accept something like that. So we should be careful in this line between context and justification, and we should always be careful when speaking about any crime, whether it was committed against Palestinians or against Israelis. I wonder how you felt their mindset changed as the war went on. And they got a little bit of, at least in terms of time, distance from the October 7th attack. Can you just describe a little bit how people may have changed their point of view about the civilian casualties? Are there attitudes towards civilian casualties in Gaza? Well, I think the people that we've spoken with obviously changed their attitude over time because they came in and they slowly realized, you know, okay, we came into the military after October 7th, but we are now involved in very, very severe crimes. There is this moment in the film where one of the officers says I'm focused on this individual that I want to kill inside the house. And I don't think about anything that happens on the way. And there's a moment where he says, but actually we know that these children are there. We know that they are going to be killed. It is intentional. And there was a moment when he just sort of realized that. He's an officer who says he believes he took part in a genocide. Coming from the perspective of an intelligence officer that works inside this framework of targets and collateral damage, I think a lot of them said, well, look, we're not saying that the civilians are the target, but the end result is going to be the same end result. It's the calculated and anticipated killing of countless civilians of entire families. And we should say that Israel, of course, has vigorously denied any claims and accusations of genocide. Rachel, you were the cinematographer on this film. Just visually, how did you think about how to underscore the idea of distance in the shots that you showed from daily activity in Tel Aviv? Yes. So basically, what you see in the film in between the interviews is you look inside people's apartment. You see the life of Tel Aviv inside the apartment. And I think one of the things that we decided to concentrate on and to show is also something that was very, very strong in the Israeli society after the 7th of October and also before, which is watching the news at 8 o'clock. It's like some sort of a ritual everybody sits and watch the news and the channel that you see that most of the people are watching, it's the mainstream media and also you hear a bit the way they're describing what Israel is doing in Gaza and the use words, like terror targets. The words they use are also showing some sort of a distance. So I think that was also part of the choice of focusing on the life of people in their arguments. Rachel, I want to ask one last thing about the look and feel of the film. As we had already mentioned, it is mostly shot with you all speaking to your sources on rooftops in Tel Aviv. But there's one scene from Gaza, really one moment at the end of the film. And to the point about trying to combat the dehumanization of Palestinian, that's the work you're trying to do here, I would love to hear about how you thought about how to use footage from Gaza, specifically the decision to use it so sparingly and only at the end of the movie. We just couldn't take the risk of people finishing the film and not understanding the full gravity of what is being said. It's not some sort of a reflection film of soldiers talking from their memories far away. I mean, these things are still happening now. So I think it was important for us to include it and to make sure that each viewer that will finish, the film will see the result of all the systems of killing that were described throughout the film. The killing in Gaza continued and continued for two years up until the ceasefire of October 2025. And to some degree, it is still continuing to this day that there's been over a thousand Palestinians killed since that ceasefire. One person in the film actually compares what he has done to the Nazis. And I want to focus on this for a second because that is such an inflammatory thing for in Israeli to say. And I'm just sort of curious about your choice to include it. Yeah, he wasn't the only one, by the way, who says that they thought about the Second World War and they thought about the genocide of the Jewish people. And he described growing up in the Israeli education system and thinking about the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the perpetrators of crimes as pure evil. And he could not understand how one would do it. And he says in the film, well, I feel like I have, I'm paraphrasing it a little bit, but he says I have a better understanding now of the role of the perpetrator. And I think that this is not at all, it's not to make a simplistic comparison. I don't think there is any comparison between the Holocaust and what happened in Gaza. I don't. But I do think that there is an importance there of thinking about, again, without making a simplistic comparison, without saying that it's the same. It's not the same, but there are common patterns of demonization as the soldier was saying. There are things that we can learn about being a perpetrator and understanding that better in order to prevent crimes from recurring in the future, which I feel are important. The way I kind of looked at it was that we're in this moment right now where the world, a lot of the world has this incredibly negative view of Israel. Anti-Semitism is on the rise. Many Israelis feel like they are in this existential battle for survival. I wonder how you feel about this larger criticism that this movie could be seized on by people who are interested in talking about things completely irrelevant to what the film is actually talking about, that it basically could feed anti-Semitism as I think sort of the thing that's being unspoken here. I'm terrified of anti-Semitism. It is on the rise. You're absolutely right. There are horrible bad faith actors on the right, but also on the left. And I hear that. And I'm not trying to dismiss that at all, Rachel, really. But I think at the same time, I will say that I don't think that should stop us from being truthful and factual. So I think what are we saying here that we cannot report about these facts because they, you know, it may increase anti-Semitism. There is a responsibility to be very clear, to oppose anti-Semitism completely. It's appalling. But that cannot seep into not being truthful and factual as a journalist. Just as, by the way, you mentioned October the 7th. Even someone saying, well, if we report about the atrocities that Hamas has committed and they have committed horrible atrocities, the massacre, the kidnapping of children, by reporting on that, by journalists doing their work and reporting on that, they would be making the Israeli-responsing Gaza much more lethal, much more vengeful. They will, we just, as journalists, we just need to be truthful to reality. And we should take into consideration and into account what you're saying. We shouldn't dismiss it. But I think that is our role. To both at this point are very recognizable. You mentioned that you're not in Israel right now, but you hope to go back. Obviously, there are these very looming safety concerns. But I would imagine that, like, walking down the street, people can spot you, people can say things to you. If you're talking about wanting to go back at some point, what do you imagine your life to be like? Just even trying to resume, I don't know, anything resembling what your life looked like before this movie? Well, it's a good question. I've been thinking about it myself. The honest answer is that I don't know. I think we will go back eventually. And I hope that I can continue my work as a journalist and as a filmmaker. And if it means I can't walk as freely as I could before in certain areas of Israel that are more right-wing, then that's maybe a price that I will pay. I'm not the only one. I mean, people are constantly paying very heavy prices for the work that they're doing much heavier than this kind of price. So I don't want to act the victim. I mean, I'm not like we did something that we believe is important and we believe is true and people should watch it. And we know that sometimes these kinds of things can come with a certain price. Israel is our home and like our work has been motivated and is motivated by a sense that we want to change. You know, we want to change the place. We want policies that we disagree with to change and we want the place to be better for Israelis and for Palestinians. And I want to see this place that I was born in, to be a place not where there is people dying every day and horrible violence and stress. And it's really, it became the holy lands, you know, Israel, Palestine. It can be a better place. And I do think that there will be no future to anyone if we do not have an honest reckoning with the present and with the past. You've all Abraham, Rachel Shore. Thank you so much for spending so much time with us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Rachel. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The capitals of Saudi Arabia and Yemen were both hit in a series of strikes on Sunday. A day after Saudi Arabia suffered its deadliest attack in over a decade. In that attack, the Houthis, the Iran-backed militant group, struck an international airport in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, killing at least 12 people and enduring more than 300. It was one of several fatal attacks by the Houthis on the airport this past week, shattering Saudi Arabia's sense of safety and removed from its war with neighboring Yemen. Where Saudi Arabia has been waging a bombing campaign against the Houthis that has killed 91 people since September 3rd, according to the Houthi run health ministry in Yemen. President Trump said on Friday that he had reached an agreement with Russia to immediately import Russian diesel fuel to the U.S. market, an extraordinary development between the two countries after years of American sanctions on Russian energy exports during the war in Ukraine. The move is an attempt by the Trump administration to contain soaring energy prices due to the war with Iran, one of the biggest political liabilities for Republicans heading into next month's midterms. Saudi experts, however, say the deal is not likely to have a major impact on the cost of diesel. Today's episode was produced by Ricky Novetsky and Claire Tenniskeder, with help from Carlos Prieto. It was edited by Maria Bern, with help from Paige Cowatt and Rob Zipko. Research helped by Susan Lee, contains music by Dan Powell and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Wunderly, special thanks to Aaron Boxerman, David Helpfinger, Yara Biyumi and Disbel Kirschner. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams, see you tomorrow.