1. The accusation at the heart of the documentary
The new documentary NAZA arrives in Venice with the kind of weight that feels almost unbearable. Its title is a clipped Hebrew abbreviation for “collateral damage,” and in just over an hour it claims to pull back the curtain on the inner workings of Israel’s military intelligence unit, Unit 8200, through the voices of 24 anonymous men and women who say they served there during the war in Gaza. The most explosive claim in the film is not about a vague policy or a technological abstraction. It is about a specific moment, a specific number, a specific act. One former soldier, speaking into the shadows, describes a system used to estimate how many civilians might be killed in a planned strike, and when asked what the highest approved estimate he ever saw was, he says, quietly, “There was approval for 500.” The implication is staggering: that the IDF had at least once contemplated, approved, and perhaps carried out a strike in which half a thousand human beings were expected to die. The documentary does not show bodies. It does not need to. The number itself is enough to make a viewer stop breathing for a second. The IDF, however, did not hesitate. Within days, it issued a sharp, unambiguous denial. In a statement posted on X, in English, the military called the claim “completely false.” It insisted that no strike in Gaza had ever been planned, approved, or carried out with an anticipated death toll of 500 civilians, or anything near that number. The military went further, arguing that the documentary’s makers had no way to verify the claim, that there was no supporting evidence, and that the anonymous source’s identity, service record, and role could not be independently checked. The message ended with a challenge: “No such strike was ever planned, approved, or carried out yet this is the claim the filmmakers chose to promote their movie with. Judge the rest accordingly.” By Monday morning, the post had been seen more than 372,000 times, and a quiet war of narratives was already underway.
2. The IDF’s sweeping rejection of the film’s credibility
The IDF’s longer response to NAZA was not merely a denial; it was an attempt to dismantle the entire edifice of the film’s credibility. The military pointed out that the testimonies were anonymous, that no independent observer could confirm whether the people on screen ever wore the uniform, what their ranks were, whether they had access to the classified materials they described, or whether they had witnessed any of the events they reconstructed with such chilling specificity. The military also raised a structural argument: many of the claims involved national strategy, command-level decisions, and operational plans that would have been far above the clearance of junior intelligence soldiers. Some scenarios, it said, concerned matters in which intelligence personnel of the type purportedly interviewed would not normally have been involved at all. The tone of the response was one of bureaucratic certainty, the voice of an institution that has been challenged and has answered, that has drawn a line in the sand and dared anyone to cross it. But for many viewers, the denials may not erase the images the film conjures: dark rooftops in Tel Aviv, faces hidden by shadow, voices trembling or flat, telling stories of a war seen through the cold interfaces of screens, maps, and target lists. The documentary’s power lies in its accumulation of detail, the way it builds from technical descriptions of systems to moral questions about the value of Palestinian life. The IDF’s response, however logical, cannot compete with the rawness of testimony. The military’s insistence that the filmmakers published an unverifiable claim may be true, but in the landscape of public memory, verification is not always the currency in which truth is traded. The accusation has already been made. It has been seen at film festivals, written about in international outlets, and repeated in conversations around the world. And once a story like that is out, it becomes a kind of ghost, impossible to fully exorcise, even with the most forceful official rebuttal.
3. What the documentary actually shows
Behind the headline allegation, NAZA unfolds as a deeply human, deeply disturbing portrait of what it means to participate in modern warfare from a distance. The interviewees, presented as Unit 8200 soldiers, describe their work as a strange mixture of surveillance, data analysis, and moral drift. They talk about screens filled with the intimate details of life in Gaza: the names of residents, the layout of apartments, the ages of children, the rhythms of daily routine. They describe a system allegedly used to estimate collateral damage before a strike, a kind of digital oracular interface that could predict how many people might die if a particular building were destroyed. One interviewee describes the process with troubling precision: you see a map of a neighborhood, you select buildings, and the system generates an estimate of the number of people who could be harmed. The interviewer asks a question that seems to cut to the heart of the matter: did the system distinguish between children, infants, and adults when calculating this estimate? The man answers simply, “It did not.” The weight of that answer is enormous. It suggests that in the calculus of war, all bodies were reduced to numbers, that the distinction between a newborn and a grown man, between a grandmother and a soldier, was flattened into a single figure. When the interviewer asks about the highest number he remembers being approved for a single strike, he pauses, then says, “I can’t say how many were killed because they never check that, but there was approval for 500.” That sentence—”they never check that”—may be the most painful of all. It implies that the killing was not only approved in advance, but that the aftermath was never even counted. In other parts of the film, the witnesses describe the use of artificial intelligence in target selection, including algorithms that allegedly relied on intercepted communications to recommend targets, sometimes based on the presence of a target’s relatives in the same building. The picture that emerges is not one of reckless, wild violence, but of something more unsettling: a methodical, systemized process in which human beings were reduced to data points, and moral responsibility was distributed across screens and software.
4. The broader context of the war and the impossible moral burden
The IDF’s response, however, is not without its own logic, and to understand it, one must understand the war from Israel’s perspective. The military frame is simple and consistent: Israel is defending its citizens against Hamas, a terrorist organization that deliberately and systematically embeds its fighters, weapons, tunnels, and command centers inside residential neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, and mosques. In such an environment, the IDF argues, civilian casualties are not only possible but inevitable, and the responsibility for those deaths lies squarely with Hamas. The military maintains that it operates in accordance with international law and the laws of armed conflict, that it takes extensive measures to reduce harm to civilians, and that it investigates specific suspicions of unlawful conduct through independent enforcement mechanisms. It rejects the documentary’s characterization of civilian casualties as intentional or as evidence of genocide, arguing that such claims misuse legal terminology and transform the tragedy of war into a malicious accusation. There is a real human story behind this official narrative as well: the story of Israeli soldiers called to fight after the horrors of October 7, the story of families killed in their homes, hostages dragged into tunnels, and a nation that felt its existence threatened. The soldiers who speak in NAZA are presented as heroes to some and traitors to others. They are young people, barely out of their teens or early twenties, who were asked to do things that no moral education could have prepared them to process. Their testimonies are not gleeful confessions of wrongdoing; they are heavy, hesitant, often fragmented accounts of a system that made them feel powerless and complicit at the same time. The IDF’s response to these accusations is not merely institutional defensiveness; it is also a refusal to accept the idea that the soldiers themselves are guilty of anything beyond doing their duty in a war they did not start. But the film asks a harder question: what does duty become when it is detached from the human consequences it produces? When you press a button on a screen and kill people you have never seen, are you a warrior or a clerk? The documentary suggests that the answer is both, and that the person who walks away from that screen is forever changed, carrying a weight that no official denial can lift.
5. The role of artificial intelligence and the fear of automated war
The debate over artificial intelligence in NAZA adds another layer to the story, one that extends far beyond the borders of Gaza. The documentary’s witnesses allege that the IDF used AI-assisted systems to recommend targets, sometimes relying on intercepted communications to identify a person and then suggesting a strike that could also kill members of their family. The implication is that the technology was not merely a tool, but an active participant in the decisions that determined who would live and who would die. The IDF rejects this characterization outright, insisting that artificial intelligence does not make targeting or strike-approval decisions, and that those decisions remain exclusively in human hands. But the very fact that this debate exists is a sign of how much the nature of war has changed. In an era of drones, cyber warfare, and algorithmic surveillance, the line between human judgment and machine processing has become dangerously thin. Soldiers describe a system that could calculate, in milliseconds, the likely number of civilian deaths in a strike, and then present that number to a commander who would decide whether to proceed. The technology was not designed to be cruel; it was designed to be efficient, to give decision-makers the best available information. But in the process, something critical was lost: the ability to see the people behind the numbers, to mourn them before they died, to hesitate because of the particularity of a life rather than the abstractness of a statistic. The interviewees’ descriptions of screens, maps, and targets evoke the image of a video game, but the consequences were absolutely real. The fear that AI might one day make these decisions on its own, with even less human oversight, is a fear that haunts not only this documentary, but the entire future of warfare. If a soldier feels guilty seeing “500” on a screen, what will it mean when there is no soldier at all, only an algorithm that decides 500 is an acceptable trade-off? The IDF’s insistence that humans are in the loop is reassuring, but the film undermines that reassurance by showing how easily human beings become the silent, obedient part of the loop, their consciences numbed by the very systems that are supposed to serve them.
6. A war of narratives and the search for historical truth
In the end, the controversy over NAZA is not just about one documentary or one strike. It is about the fundamental question of how a nation remembers its wars, and how a people mourns its losses. The film is competing for the Golden Lion at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, but its real subject is the impossibility of bearing witness to a conflict in which each side believes, with absolute certainty, that its cause is just and its suffering is greater. The IDF has a duty to defend Israel and to protect its soldiers from false accusations; the filmmakers have a duty to give voice to those who were asked to do the impossible and to never forget the costs of war. Between these two duties lies a chasm of pain. The families of Israeli hostages and soldiers lost to Hamas will not find comfort in a documentary that portrays the army of their country as a machine of indiscriminate killing. The families of Palestinians in Gaza, buried under the rubble of homes and schools, will not find justice in an official statement that denies the death toll and dismisses their lives as unverifiable. Perhaps the truth, if it can ever be established, is not a single point but a field of tension, a place where the testimony of anonymous soldiers and the denials of an official institution exist side by side, unresolved and unresolvable. The IDF’s final appeal is to the court of public opinion: judge the film by the unsupported nature of its claims. But the film’s appeal, quieter and more difficult, is to the court of conscience: judge the war by the human beings it created, the soldiers who cannot unsee what they saw, and the civilians who never got to speak. The title NAZA—collateral damage—is usually a term used to describe the people who die as an unintended consequence of military action. But the documentary turns that word back on itself. Perhaps the deepest collateral damage of all is the moral injury suffered by a society that must live with the knowledge of what was done in its name, and the deep uncertainty about whether anyone, anywhere, truly knows what happened. The IDF says the claim of an approved strike on 500 civilians is completely false. The soldier in the film says it was real. Between those two statements resides an entire universe of grief, memory, and the desperate need for accountability. And it is there, in that impossible middle, that the truth of this war will continue to be fought, long after the cameras are gone.