Naza

The documentary filmmakers from “No Other Land” return with a harrowing follow-up

At the beginning of the current Israeli war in Gaza, opinions were heavily divided as to which narrative was “correct.” Some claimed Israel had the right to defend itself after the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7th, while others said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was using this as an excuse to occupy and ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip. However, as further journalism and stories have made it out of Gaza, the uneven response from Israel has become ever more apparent, as tens of thousands of civilians have been massacred, starved, and displaced in Gaza. Art has been shining a light on this increasingly intolerable injustice, yet even the polarization of the subject affects it, especially in America. This was most apparent with the documentary No Other Land (2024), about the settler conflict in the West Bank, which never found a US distributor, even after winning the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and had to be released independently. Two of the directors of that documentary are back, with a film that shines a light on the horrors in Gaza, and once again has no US distributor: Naza (2026).

Naza is a collaboration between documentary filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor alongside The Guardian newspaper. In it, the documentary interviews anonymous Israel Defense Forces members, with voices altered and in shadow, who detail the systemic instructions and actions that they followed and enacted to target civilians in Gaza.

Naza is a provocative film, to put it lightly; it goes toward the most taboo question regarding the Gaza war: whether there is a genocide occurring or not. Under the UN Genocide Convention, whose definition the International Criminal Court also uses, a genocide is when a group is targeted with the intent to destroy it, in whole or in part. The fact that such a massacre is occurring in Gaza is undeniable at this point, but whether it’s just an indiscriminate way of treating collateral damage by the IDF or an actual targeting of civilians is the question at hand. Naza seeks to clarify this ambiguity. By hearing from the actual perpetrators themselves, all anonymous, we get a first-hand, chilling account of the unabashed matter-of-factness of how the IDF targeted family homes, sniped people at a food line, or launched a drone strike on a solitary boy. Soldiers describe the targeting of women and children, the bombing of houses with disabled or sickly people who can’t move, and the competition to see how quickly they could burn down a house, all of it displayed and reasoned as being a justifiable revenge, and the dangerous narrative from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict of “it’s either them or me.”

Some of the interviewed soldiers do show some sense of remorse, yet they also try and reason their actions so as to not admit the full darkness and contribution of their actions. Unprompted, some compare themselves to Nazis, yet not in the way you think. Some say that after carrying out the mass killings of civilians, they understood the Nazis better, instead of taking a step back and realizing what such a comparison actually means and represents.

The documentary could have been rather rote if it was simply blackened figures with modified voices recounting horrors of their actions and attempting to reflect on their own responsibilities. Yet, Abraham and Szor do something more ingenious. They stage their interviews on the rooftops of Tel Aviv. Amongst the voiceover of their interviewees they intercut images of indistinguishable people in their apartments, going about their daily lives. It’s a brilliant way of conveying not only that the perpetrators of such horrors are living comfortably amongst a normal city, but that Israel itself is oblivious to the utter destruction and crimes against humanity happening mere kilometers away. It’s a subtle juxtaposition that creates the contradictions and clashes on screen in a way that makes the disproportionate nature of the conflict impossible to ignore.

It is true, by journalistic standards, that when only anonymous sources tell your story, the claims carry less weight than a fully verifiable source. Things remain as hearsay, subject to the credibility of the documentarians. Abraham and Szor have never given any reason to not be credible themselves, and they are recognized within the documentarian community. Nevertheless, to not have named sources does detract from the astounding revelations, as well as the emotional attachment of seeing actual faces recounting the horrors they have caused. At the same time, anonymity provides a key tool to the confessional aspect of the documentary. An IDF soldier might not admit to the darkest recesses of their memory if they didn’t have the protection of anonymity, and by not showing a particular face as the guilty party, it also passes the responsibility to the IDF, Israeli, and world populace at large. Viewers transpose themselves as the bystanders of such horrors, seeing hate and anger enacted in a systematized way that recalls the worst ethnic cleansings, massacres, and, yes, genocides in history (even though the ICC has never actually convicted anyone of genocide in its history).

In the end, Naza is a harrowing and necessary viewing. One that shines a further light into the horrors that humanity is capable of, but from a rather meditative and relaxed conversational approach. It is the casualness with which the interviewees recount their actions that is the most difficult thing to swallow, something that both brings a light as to the truth of what is occurring in Gaza, and also a shadow as to our hope for humanity.

8.8/10