Right, so twenty-four Israelis who served inside the military system used to target Gaza have just done something the IDF could really have done without.
They’ve talked.
Soldiers, intelligence officers, people who watched the screens, gathered the surveillance and helped produce the targets.
Their testimony is now a documentary called NAZA, and it has just won the Special Jury Prize at Venice.
So Israel’s response?
Deny the lot, obviously. Then have Netanyahu’s culture minister accuse the filmmakers of treason and threaten to have their citizenship revoked. And there was me thinking this was the ordained by God 3000 years in the making promised land, so how can you do that then?
The people who hid their identities because they feared Israeli retaliation have just been proven rather sensible to do so then.
The IDF has another meltdown on its hands.
And this one is too big to bury.
But the latest public scandal of the Israeli army was home-made. The IDF doesn't have to accuse the usual suspects when it can blow itself up from the inside.
Now the mess is too big to sweep under the carpet, even if you borrowed the largest broom in the world.
Let’s be honest. It’s not about the film festival. Do you really think that the fate of Gaza depends on who, in Venice, gets a glittering trophy and wears a tuxedo?
In the world outside of filmmaking, no one ever wakes up in a cold sweat to find out who’s won the Special Jury Prize at Venice. But now it’s been drawn into the world’s spotlight, and Israeli military insiders have emerged, describing the sausage factory that chooses targets in Gaza, calculates the number of civilian casualties, and authorises air strikes even when there are families inside their houses.
Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor spent about three years conducting interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers who had participated in the surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting operations during Israel's assault on Gaza.
Most of them are not the ones kicking in doors. They watch screens, they sift information, they compute the targets, they count the inhabitants of the houses that Israel will attack and who will be inside at the time of the attack. People who know too much you could say.
The Israeli government’s preferred version of the story is that the allegations against the IDF come from Hamas, from hostile foreign governments, from vile outsiders, or from the human rights organisation of the week, which it has decided is most definitely antisemitic.
But this very much is not them. These are the Israelis who actually ran the system who have made the accusations.
It’s even worse when Israeli politicians and journalists condemn the film without having seen it of course, because of course they were going to do that too, they have become oh so predictable in their self righteousness. Such ‘psychic’ criticism is always on hand and always readily platformed by mainstream media.
But Yuval Abraham addressed that little outbreak of clairvoyance when he accepted the prize.
Ignorance is bliss, and treason is anything that makes you squirm in your seat.
Don't watch the film. Don't examine the testimony. Don't ask whether the system being described is real. Just jam your fingers in your ears and chant 'most moral army in the world' to yourself until you’ve convinced yourself once more that it’s true. Until the awkward questions go away.
Except they haven't gone away.
Now they're standing on a stage at one of the world's most prominent film festivals, holding an award.
Even the film's title is a glaring neon sign, flaring up what Israel would rather we didn't notice.
NAZA is a Hebrew military acronym referring to anticipated collateral damage. That is, the number of civilians likely to be killed by the attack.
Expected.
Not a case of civilian casualties that were discovered after the event; not a catastrophe which arose in the ruins after the bombs had dropped. These were people whose presence could be estimated before an attack was authorised and still got authorised.
A parent is collateral damage, a family is collateral, whereas a child is one unit in the calculation, one statistic.
As the words are twisted, the brutality starts to sound routine, almost like an office procedure. A mere number in the list, waiting to be signed off, crossed off, and then time for lunch.
NAZA includes an exchange though that strips away that casual war crime in seconds.
A baby? That's just one NAZA. Not a person, just a handy unit for the spreadsheet-easier to delete than to mourn.
Not a baby. Not merely someone’s offspring. Not someone who has barely started on life.
One NAZA.
In deciding what to do, the system makes no distinction between an adult and a child. Nor does it mean that a rogue program has decided on its own to kill a baby. The opposite is true isn’t it? Humans built the system, set the thresholds, picked the targets, and rubber-stamped the strikes.
People talk about artificial intelligence like it's some ghost in the machine that floated down from the clouds and started making decisions on its own. Well that threat is certainly prevalent in reporting right now, but it hasn’t happened here.
People designed it. People fed information into it. People decided how it would be used. People chose how many Palestinian civilians could be placed at risk for a particular target.
This technology did not absolve men from responsibility; it merely accelerated the process of making human decisions, while giving their decisions the reassuring appearance of something technical that could be scapegoated if needs be.
It's a spreadsheet with a kill switch. The tech bros of Silicon Valley would be proud.
According to the testimony presented in NAZA, surveillance personnel could examine maps of Gaza, identify buildings, and see estimates for how many people might be harmed if a particular home was bombed.
The source was asked to sketch what that looked like.
A map of the neighbourhood.
A map covering every building in Gaza.
Then comes the bit no amount of military jargon can sugarcoat though, no matter how many acronyms they might try to sprinkle on top.
"Ahmed and his family will die."
That is what 'anticipated collateral damage' really means, isn’t it?
The family wasn't invisible. The building wasn't unknown. The possibility of civilian deaths wasn't discovered after the attack.
It was there on the screen.
The documentary's allegation is not that the IDF occasionally failed to notice civilians.
It is that civilian presence was incorporated into the process.
The number could be estimated. The expected harm could be displayed. Then somebody could decide whether the target was considered valuable enough to be worth it anyway and that little detail shreds the all too often told pack of lies where Israel only ever aims at military targets and civilians are always avoided where possible.
They were already part of the calculation.
And this is where the system's cold calculations finally cash out of course, because that doesn’t happen on a computer screen, it happens in real time in real life.
Here.
With paramedics hauling out bodies, parents clawing through rubble, children buried under what used to be their bedrooms, and homes turned into dust and broken memories.
If you show only these images, Israel calls them unfortunate consequences of war.
Talk only about the software, and suddenly it's a debate about algorithms and targeting accuracy, as if war crimes are just a coding bug.
Put them together instead.
The people dragged from the rubble are the physical meaning of the number shown before the strike.
That ruined family home? That's what 'anticipated collateral damage' looks like when anticipation turns into a fireball.
While NAZA was being screened in Venice, the killing in Gaza did not pause for the festival.
Abraham used his acceptance speech to name six Palestinian children he said Israel had killed during those ten days.
A three-year-old girl at school.
A seven-year-old child with her father in a car.
Two sisters asleep at home.
NAZA crunches them into numbers. Abraham's speech does the unthinkable and turns those numbers back into actual children.
No electronic system can make their deaths morally right. No acronym makes the decision less human. And no amount of technocratic waffle transforms a family home into an empty military object when the system itself indicates that the family is very much there.
But as if all of this was not horrifying enough already, we then we reach the documentary's most extreme allegation.
One concealed source was asked about the highest number of anticipated civilian deaths associated with a single airstrike and the answer needs to be heard in full, because the distinction inside it matters.
The source says some strikes killed 20, 30, or even 300 people.
They then say there was approval on one occasion to kill 500 people for one human target, while adding that they did not know how many were actually killed because it was never assessed.
They can crunch the numbers and decide if it’s worth the strike, but to count the bodies afterwards? Can’t be bothered apparently.
The IDF of course categorically rejects that.
According to the military's response reported by Ynet, no attack involving 500 deaths was planned, approved, or carried out. The IDF also challenges the documentary's reliance on anonymous witnesses.
But the IDF's denial doesn't make the other 23 sources vanish in a puff of smoke does it? And we have to remember this is an Israeli made film. Israelis stand accusing their own government, their own army and by God it’s good to see isn’t it? That not all Israelis are the same.
This documentary did not materialise from nowhere at Venice either. The systems underlying its investigation had been reported on before. Target generation, mass surveillance, automated identification, and permitted civilian-casualty thresholds were already matters of international scrutiny. Keir Starmer’s surveillance flights from RAF Akrotiri over Gaza as the first instance that immediately springs to my mind.
NAZA brought together Israeli personnel involved in those processes and let them describe what it looked like from the inside.
The film's argument is not about one button, one target, or one rogue operator having an unusually murderous Tuesday afternoon.
It is about the literal policy that is in place and Abraham made that conclusion explicit.
Systemic.
That is the filmmakers' conclusion, based on the testimony they gathered. It is not an independent judicial ruling of course, but it is also far more substantial than the explanation Israel would prefer: isolated mistakes in an otherwise immaculate and ‘most moral’ system.
Twenty-four people from within that system spoke to the filmmakers.
They concealed their identities because they feared retaliation.
The IDF argues that their anonymity makes the testimony difficult to challenge. OK, let give them that for a moment. Anonymous evidence does carry limitations.
But then, as if auditioning for the role of 'reason number one to stay anonymous,' waltzes in Netanyahu’s Culture Minister Miki Zohar.
Zohar called the film vile. Oh you do surprise me Miki. He described its creators as despicable. He accused them of treason against the state and announced that he would act to have Abraham and Szor's citizenship revoked. Subtle as a sledgehammer, that one Miki.
Subtle fellow, Miki. The land was promised to them as well as you though surely? Are you not risking God’s wrath to deny them that?
Presented with Israeli testimony about the killing of Palestinians, his response was not merely to challenge the claims. It was to threaten the filmmakers' membership in the country itself. Anyone might think you were afraid of something. Hasbara budget going up again soon is it?
Nothing screams 'these witnesses had nothing to fear' quite like a cabinet minister throwing a wobbler at anyone who dares record them.
Zohar cannot personally revoke anybody's citizenship.
Israel's citizenship law actually requires action through the Interior Ministry and judicial approval. The Israeli Supreme Court has said this power should be reserved for exceptionally severe cases.
No citizenship has been revoked. No treason conviction exists. No confirmed legal application has yet stripped Abraham or Szor of anything, though we could hardly put it beyond the realms of possibility I daresay.
What we do have is a threat, hanging in the air like the world's worst air freshener, telling the world they’ve got Netanyahu’s government on the ropes over this.
The IDF says anonymous sources cannot be properly challenged. In contrast, the government says the filmmakers who protected those sources should be treated as traitors: quite the comedy duo isn’t it?
Quite the double act.
One demands names. The other demonstrates what might happen if names actually get provided.
Meanwhile, this supposed little film festival controversy has reached the upper levels of the Israeli military and state.
The IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir is reportedly discussing NAZA. The Israeli Film Council is reportedly reconsidering the scoring applied to film festivals following the controversy. Toys out of the pram stuff again I suppose?
No funding cut, but look at the panic already set off by a documentary that Israel's defenders insisted was just hostile propaganda. If this is what 'irrelevant' looks like; I'd hate to see a real crisis.
The army issues a categorical denial.
The chief of staff discusses it.
A cabinet minister threatens the filmmakers.
The Film Council starts reconsidering how it treats festivals.
Everyone's calm. Nobody's rattled. That smell of panic? Oh, you’re imagining things, nothing to see here.
And this lands on an IDF already under pressure from workforce strain, equipment problems, casualties, legal exposure, and the consequences of fighting across multiple fronts, budgetary and manpower crises as I’ve covered in previous videos.
And now NAZA adds another rupture. We just keep chip, chipping away!
An army can attack an enemy. It can bombard another country. It can accuse foreign journalists, international institutions, and human rights groups of bias. But it gets a lot more difficult to pull off when the people spilling the secrets are wearing your own uniform.
Israel's usual defence depends upon presenting every accusation as something imposed from outside. NAZA turns that defence inside out.
These are Israeli filmmakers.
The sources are Israeli military and intelligence personnel.
The terminology belongs to the IDF. NAZA is an Israeli military acronym
And the political threat came from an Israeli minister.
The Venice prize is not important because a group of film people applauded another group of film people. The people beneath Israel's bombs do not require the approval of a European festival for their deaths to matter.
It matters because the testimony has escaped.
The film's gone global. Its allegations are bouncing around the world. Israel can denounce it, threaten the filmmakers, and tinker with festival scoring until every culture official in the country is twitching like they've got espresso going in via an IV.
It cannot restore the silence that existed before those 24 insiders spoke out. Whistleblowers. And the response is to call them treasonous.
Abraham ended by explaining what he believes that silence enables though.
The IDF denies the documentary's allegations. That denial nevertheless is an essential part of the story though.
So to do the 24 Israelis who described the system from within.
So does the language that turned babies into NAZA figures.
So does the targeting interface that could place Ahmed and his family inside the anticipated cost of an attack.
And so does the cabinet minister who responded to a film about military dehumanisation by threatening to cast its Israeli makers out of their own country.
Zohar wanted to discredit the filmmakers. Instead, he demonstrated why their witnesses hid and why this film is so important and why it just won a prize and its makers won themselves a 23 minute standing ovation.
The IDF wanted to keep the allegations anonymous and wave them away as unreliable. Instead, their denials, frantic meetings, and the government's hissy fit have only shown how hard this film has hit them.
Israel's own personnel have described the targeting used in Gaza. Their testimony has crossed Israel's borders, won international recognition, and forced the state into a furious public response, which frankly only makes them look more guilty.
The IDF can't bomb this problem, can't arrest it at a checkpoint, and worst of all for them, they can't just slap a 'propaganda' sticker on it, because this one came from inside the ranks. And every threat against the whistleblowers proves why this story is now too big to bury, no matter how much Gazan rubble you pile on top.
For more news giving Israel a bad day, the sort of stuff the mainstream seems too afraid to touch, stick with the channel for more, another serving of comeuppance right here for your next watch.
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