I just saw NAZA at the New York Film Festival. There were a dozen cops outside the theater checking people’s bags. Protesters were anticipated but there were no protests—just a car with the message “NO PROOF” plastered on its door, circling the block.
Several people spoke briefly before the screening. One of them was Harry Davies, an investigative reporter at the Guardian, which co-produced the film. Harry reminded the audience that investigative reporting is based on information obtained from sources whose anonymity is a vital institution. He also said the Guardian’s investigations department (that is, he and his colleagues) had fact-checked all the assertions made by interviewees in the film and had corroborated all of them. Many of the things recounted in the film had been previously published in the Israeli-Palestinian online magazine +972 (whose journalists I know personally). The film itself was the result of nearly three years of work by this team.
As for the film, I can’t say whether it’s great or not. It is staggering. People talk about the work they do with Tel Aviv in the background: we see people in the windows and imagine other people in other windows sixty kilometers down the coast. The interviewees describe a well-oiled machine for murdering people, not a one-off totally fucked-up incident amidst the war. Many of the film’s critics have overlooked the Israeli army’s use of AI to select its targets for murder. According to their own estimates, the system is now approximately eighty-five percent effective, meaning that a minimum of fifteen percent of its targets had nothing to do with Hamas. Moreover, a target doesn’t equated to a victim, hence the term NAZA itself, which is an acronym for “collateral damage” [in Hebrew]. The [IDF] officers in the film explain that a NAZA value of twenty is the threshold of hesitation. Killing twenty bystanders to take out a single alleged insurgent could be problematic, but any number below twenty is a-okay. And yet the officers recall instances where NAZA values of 500 and 200 were green-lighted. Why such [high] numbers? Because alleged or genuine members of Hamas are killed at night, in residential buildings, along with everyone in their vicinity. The estimate of potential victims can be made quite accurately due to the total system of surveillance [used by the IDF]. They can hack a telephone and use it as a microphone. Do you hear a baby crying in the background? The baby is only a single NAZA.
There are many other harrowing details in the film.
The Israeli secret services will have a tough time identifying the interviewees. We don’t see their faces, and sometimes even their heads are hard to make out; their voices have been altered, and their handwriting has been blurred. Many of the interviews draw and caption on paper what they saw on their [computer] screens. Many of them are involved in combat remotely. One of the interviewees had been in Gaza itself, burning down houses.
There was no ovation [when the screening ended]: no one applauded at all, so the credits rolled down the screen in profound silence. I could hear several people crying, and the person to my left intoned, “Oh Jesus, Jesus.”
Something else that struck me as vital is the extent to which war is no longer waged blindly, the extent to which every decision, every step in this war, and in all contemporary wars, is weighed and documented, and yet people continue to make those decisions nonetheless.
Some of the interviewees describe their role as a technical one, while others speak of the prestige of working in reconnaissance, about their mission, about [being part of] the speartip pointed at the enemy. One person talks about having “fun.” Judging by what they say, nearly none of them feels hatred. Hatred isn’t obligatory for committing murder, nor is ignorance. Remember the parable about the smoke constantly streaming from the crematorium and how “we were looking the other way”? You can’t say that anymore.
The film will soon be viewable on the Guardian’s website. I heartily recommend that everyone see it. Don’t be in a hurry to sound off now [about this post]: you might feel like an idiot only a couple of weeks later. Wait and see the film, and then we’ll talk.
Source: Elena Kostyuchenko (Facebook), 27 September 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader, who thanks Simon Pirani for the suggestion.
