Israeli Authorities Threaten to Strip Citizenship from “NAZA” Filmmakers documenting Gaza Genocide

The Yuval Abraham-Rachel Szor documentary No Other Land generated great controversy before it won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2024. Now comes the directors’ sequel, NAZA [“Collateral damage”], which was produced by The Guardian, and has elicited an avalanche of attacks on the filmmakers, and efforts to discredit them. The film was first shown at the 83^rd Venice Film Festival, where it received a 25-minute standing ovation and won the Special Jury Prize. NAZA is currently being screened at the New York Film Festival from through October 4.

Directors Abraham and Szor discussed their film with the journal +972, saying, “Over the past three years, we conducted night-time interviews on the rooftops of Tel Aviv with 24 Israeli soldiers, who played an active role in Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. Most of them were intelligence officers, working behind screens and participating remotely in the mass killing of Palestinians . . .We made this film for one simple reason: We understood that testimonies from officers and soldiers in the army that annihilated Gaza — those who conducted the surveillance, who calculated how many innocent people were likely to be killed in each house, and who repeatedly gave the green light to bomb entire families, would make it even harder to deny the crimes . . .This is a film about a system. It focuses on orders, policies, and patterns of operation.”

They conclude, “The mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza was not a ‘tragic byproduct’ of a war against Hamas, as it is commonly portrayed in Israel; but a premeditated, calculated, and intentional act. When asked how he could murder an innocent family, whom he could see had no involvement in military activities, he said coldly, ‘You understand that the objective is to destroy.’ That’s how innocent people become ‘collateral damage’ or NAZA.”

Otherwise, the film avoids discussion of the soldiers’ personal motivations, in order to keep the focus on the victims.  The candid testimonies of the soldiers “implicate an entire system, for which the highest echelons of Israel’s political and military leadership bear ultimate responsibility. We hope the film can contribute toward accountability for Israel’s grave crimes and justice for their victims.” In context of the Holocaust experience, they pose the existential question: “How can one group of human beings consent to the complete dehumanization of another?”

The widespread objection to this film in Israel is a reflection on how October 7 has united Israelis across most of the political spectrum in opposition to a two-state solution. There is “a broad mainstream united in rejecting any reckoning with Israel’s actions,” according to Haaretz correspondent David Isaacharoff. He explains, “Every time a film exposes Israel’s actions against Palestinians – from the daily realities of occupation in the West Bank to a genocidal war in Gaza – the Israeli mainstream erupts in outrage, casting itself as the victim of ‘blood libels.’” The fierce reaction to the film includes a vow by Netanyahu’s Culture Minister, Miki Zohar, to strip Abraham and Szor of their Israeli citizenship. Isaacharoff summarizes the dilemma poignantly: “Almost three years after October 7, Israelis remain trapped in the trauma and horror of that day, unwilling to confront what their own country has inflicted in response.” Netanyahu and his ruling Likud Party have so elevated paranoia in Israel that they have managed to unite the nation “against an enemy no one has seen” – the film. Even the prime minister’s adversary, Avigdor Lieberman, has called it “treason.”

Netanyahu is going to pass two laws intended to punish any Israeli who comes out against the genocide. The first will see the citizenship of individuals revoked, and the second to increase the amount recoverable in libel cases twentyfold.

This will be used not only against the… pic.twitter.com/0OXdKwLe00

— Shaiel Ben-Ephraim (@academic_la) September 16, 2026

It is worth discussing “NAZA” in the context of another film, Holding Liat, which depicts the Hamas kidnapping of Liat Beinin Atzili from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, and the family ordeal that came with it. She was freed a month later, but her husband Aviv was murdered by Hamas on October 7. Liat’s father Yehuda Beinin said in a Facebook post, “Holding Liat asks Israelis to confront what happens to us when we stop seeing Palestinians as human beings.” He also criticized the Netanyahu government in a CNN op-ed for focusing more on the military campaign in Gaza, than working to bring the hostages home safely. Beinin said on Facebook of the film, “It doesn’t ask Israelis to forget October 7 or what happened to Liat and Aviv. It asks whether we can go through something like October 7 and still come out believing that the other side is human.”

Photo of Gaza Dec. 23 by Emad El Byed on Unsplash

Liat’s uncle is former Stanford Middle East Professor Joel Beinin. He discussed it in an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting in February 2026, with Lance Kramer, a distant cousin, and one of the film’s producers. Kramer said, “Yehuda was very concerned that his own family’s trauma and situation would be used to serve a political and militaristic purpose that he did not believe in, nor did he think would be a way to honor Liat and Aviv. So he felt very compelled to be outspoken about that.” Yehuda Beinin explained his objection to Israel using his daughter’s kidnapping as a justification for the Gaza aggression and Netanyahu’s leadership, “Since Oct. 7, Netanyahu has made the order of his goals clear – destroy Hamas’ military and governing capabilities first, secure the release of the hostages second. . . . Netanyahu is not fit to manage this conflict. His agenda seems to simply be to inflict as much destruction in Gaza as possible. That tells you all you need to know about his regard for civilian casualties. To Netanyahu, innocent lives are the price Israel pays to keep their homeland safe.”

For Middle East scholars and insiders such as Joel Beinin, the soulless horror depicted in NAZA is “nothing new”: “We saw it livestreamed on our phones, when Israel announced the intent to obliterate Gaza. I haven’t seen the film, but know about it from what was covered in +972. What’s shocking is to hear former soldiers say, ‘I did this, or ordered it.’ There’s a big flap of criticism because the film doesn’t feature Palestinians, but reiterates what they said in real time. The film is important to show that at least some Israelis acknowledge what their country has done, and dissent from it. Not all Israelis are in one box – they are not a monolith. Holding Liat is about my family & how we reacted to a small piece of what happened on Oct 7. That was also criticized for lacking a Palestinian POV.”

NAZA is a Hebrew military acronym for Nezek Agavi (נז״א). It means “collateral damage” in reference to the expected number of civilian casualties. The film investigates the internal Israeli military dynamics, to depict how the calculated murders of Palestinian civilians has become normalized and accepted, as an opportunity cost of war. It is an indictment of the Likud government and Netanyahu’s self-aggrandizing political culture, which has prosecuted genocide in Gaza, pogroms in the West Bank, and corrupted the Israeli soul to normalize these atrocities.