A number called Naza

 When Naza slipped into New York's IFC Center without a major distributor behind it, few expected a documentary with no narrator and no archive footage to reignite a national argument. Yet its American arrival, expanding on 9 October to Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle, with a free Guardian stream to follow in late November, has done exactly that.  

The timing is pointed. The film reaches US audiences as the war has bitterly divided Democrats and even some Republicans, and ahead of congressional elections in which American military support for Israel has become an all-important question. 

An academic study found the Biden and Trump administrations supplied at least $21.7bn in military assistance in the conflict's first two years. For a growing number of Americans uneasy about where their money has gone, Naza answers in the words of the people who say they did the targeting.

"Much of what is being described was done with American taxpayer money," co-director Yuval Abraham has said. "My country did it, but they would never have been able to do it without American diplomatic and military support."

From a Venice ovation to a global release

Naza arrived in cinemas carrying extraordinary momentum. At the Venice Film Festival in September, it drew a record 25-minute standing ovation and left with the Special Jury Prize. It went on to top the Italian box office, outperforming even Avengers: Endgame – Encore and secured an international release through the independent studio mk2. 

Its directors, Abraham and Rachel Szor, were hardly unknowns: their previous film, No Other Land, won the 2025 Oscar for best documentary and was likewise self-distributed in the US, taking more than $2.5m. The pattern is now familiar: acclaim abroad, fury in Israel.

What the film shows

For all the noise around it, Naza is austere. Across 80 minutes there are no talking heads, no footage of airstrikes only disguised figures on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, faces in shadow and voices altered, some sketching on pen and paper the systems they describe. The title is a military acronym, from the Hebrew for collateral damage, used to denote the number of civilians expected to die in a given strike.

The 24 serving and former intelligence personnel describe a war run, in part, by machine. One AI tool, they say, trawled surveillance to generate a target database of tens of thousands; another recommended which buildings to hit. They talk of a 15% permitted error rate, and of one operation approved against a single Hamas militant that anticipated 500 civilian deaths. 

"Much of what is being described was done with American taxpayer money. My country did it, but they would never have been able to do it without American diplomatic and military support." ….. Yuval Abraham/ Co-director, Naza

One likens the remote killing to a video game; another recalls strikes on people walking to a food distribution site. "We wanted it to be a simple film," Szor has said. "There is something very scary about someone drawing systems that are causing mass killing."

The approach has its critics. The Guardian's own reviewer, Peter Bradshaw, admired the "chilling light" it casts but noted that anonymity blunts the force of the testimony, and found a speaker's comparison to Nazism "ahistorical" and "specious". What is not in dispute is the film's cumulative dread. "After you watch the film," Abraham said at the New York premiere, "it becomes much harder to doubt that these are real people."

A state that wants its filmmakers gone

The response in Israel has been ferocious. Culture minister Miki Zohar branded the directors' work "treason" and demanded their citizenship be revoked; Benjamin Netanyahu called the film antisemitic and backed moves to strip them of their passports. 

Abraham now fears he cannot go home. In early October, the IDF issued a multi-page rebuttal calling the film "distorted, misleading and disingenuous", insisting humans — not algorithms — approve every strike and that interviewees saw only part of the process.

The filmmakers and the Guardian pushed back hard, revealing that the reporting rested on more than 100 sources interviewed over three years, including senior commanders, and corroborated by leaked documents and strike-by-strike verification. They note the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press have separately confirmed Israel's use of AI-driven targeting. 

More than 2,000 people, among them prominent Israeli filmmakers, have signed a petition in the directors' defence; the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Documentary Association have condemned the threats against them.

That a government should try to disown its own citizens over a film may prove to be the most quietly damning testimony of all. And now, the film is playing in front of an audience whose government is equally complicit.