A documentary about alleged Israeli military conduct in Gaza has triggered a fierce backlash across Israel, exposing an unusual area of agreement among politicians and much of the country’s media establishment ahead of October’s elections.
NAZA, made by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, revisits allegations that the military used artificial intelligence systems to generate targets in Gaza, sometimes destroying entire buildings in attempts to kill a single person identified by the system.
Those claims were reported in April 2024, while allegations that Israel committed genocide, deliberately caused famine and unlawfully killed children have also previously received limited attention in Israel.
But the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it received a 25-minute standing ovation, has brought the accusations to the centre of Israel’s political debate.
Backlash over Gaza documentary
Culture Minister Miki Zohar called for Abraham and Szor to be stripped of their citizenship and investigated by the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence service, for treason.
Army chief Eyal Zamir dismissed the documentary as being based on “blood libel” and ordered a legal inquiry into the military and intelligence sources who contributed to it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also cited the film while advancing legislation to revoke the citizenship of people deemed to have smeared Israeli soldiers. Graffiti describing the directors as “traitors” has appeared in the coastal city of Ashdod.
Orly Noy, an editor at Local Call, which first published many of the allegations featured in the film, said the reaction had extended beyond the filmmakers themselves.
“You can’t really understand the extent of the madness from outside of the country,” she said. “They’re attacking the friends and families of [the filmmakers] Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. They’re talking about revoking their citizenship. They’re asking the Shin Bet to investigate them – for making a film, and it isn’t just the politicians. Journalists, who you might expect to show some kind of solidarity with them, are competing to attack them. It’s scary.”
Israeli media accused of ignoring Gaza crisis
The response has followed a period in which Israeli journalists told the Committee to Protect Journalists that censorship and harassment had intensified, with the media’s approach becoming “part of the war effort”.
A study by the Israeli think tank Molad found that only 3 per cent of Channel 12’s coverage during the first six months of the war mentioned Gaza’s humanitarian crisis. Of 206 war-related images and video clips broadcast by the country’s most-watched channel, two showed Palestinian civilian casualties.
Despite that limited coverage, polls conducted before the film’s release found that most Israelis believed the reporting they received about the military’s conduct in Gaza was balanced.
Anat Saragusti, a jurist and journalist responsible for press freedom at the Union of Journalists in Israel, said mainstream outlets had failed to investigate the army’s conduct or adequately report the Palestinian perspective.
“[The Israeli media] hardly reported on the human toll and the scale of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” she said.
Saragusti said the media gap had been reinforced by a national narrative that Israel’s war was imposed on it after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack, and that the group’s use of civilians as human shields made mass casualties in Gaza unavoidable. In that account, she said, Palestinian deaths were portrayed as collateral damage caused by Hamas’s tactics rather than by Israeli military actions.
Political condemnation crosses party lines
The film has faced criticism not only from Netanyahu’s supporters but also from members of the opposition.
Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief and one of Netanyahu’s principal political rivals, condemned it as showing “moral blindness, a detachment from reality, and harm to the State of Israel in a difficult hour”.
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who is also standing in October’s election, described the documentary as a “horrific blood libel against our sons and daughters”.
Israeli political sociologist Daniel Bar-Tal said even opposition parties had joined the attacks, arguing that Israeli Jews were denying the genocide allegation.
Noy said the intensity of the response had grown as the election approached. “Everything gets heightened the closer to the election we get,” she said, adding that journalists, politicians and media organisations were forming “some kind of incitement machine”.
