I’m not sure how Yuval Abraham keeps an even temper throughout Naza, as he interviews various members of the Israel Defense Forces about the systematic bombing of Palestinian targets in Gaza in recent years, including domestic residences known to be housing children. (“Naza” refers to the calculation used to determine acceptable human collateral.) What he hears is chilling and numbing. Of course, Abraham is not new to such atrocities. He and co-director Rachel Szor were also part of the team behind 2025’s No Other Land, which documented Israeli squads destroying the homes, schools, and water-supply systems of Palestinian families. In Naza, Abraham holds clandestine rooftop interviews in Tel Aviv with some 24 IDF intelligence officers—all in shadowy silhouette and with altered voices to preserve anonymity—during which they describe a highly organized, strategic, comprehensive effort to eradicate a specific population. (Abraham never has to suggest the inconceivably ironic parallels to Nazi Germany, as one of the intelligence officers does it unprompted.) We never learn the motivations for the disclosures; some of the officers express a certain regret, while others describe the campaigns as “fun.” It’s something like an in-real-time version of The Act of Killing, the 2013 documentary in which murderers who were part of anti-Communist purges in Indonesia in the 1960s brag about their past crimes. Although co-produced by the British newspaper The Guardian, Naza is light on documentation, beyond the interviewees’ testimonies. If No Other Land offered an eyewitness account, this stands more as a damning allegation—supported in its final moments by mobile-phone footage of civilian corpses buried beneath Gazan rubble. Less difficult to watch, but equally haunting, are the interstitial shots of Tel Aviv residents in their high-rise apartments, going about their nightly routines and enjoying a relative peace that the Israeli government scrupulously seeks to obliterate elsewhere.
(10/4/2026)
