Threats intensify against Israeli directors of Gaza documentary NAZA

Threats by the Israeli military, government ministers and far-right activists have intensified against the Oscar-winning Israeli directors of NAZA, a documentary about the country’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, as 43 local human rights organisations expressed their support for the pair.

NAZA, which was produced by the Guardian, is named for an acronym used euphemistically by Israel’s intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza. The film builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and the Guardian between 2023 and 2025.

The 80-minute documentary won the special jury prize at this year’s Venice film festival on Saturday, after receiving a 25-minute standing ovation – a festival record.

Soon afterwards, however, the film’s directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, came under attack from members of Israel’s government, with the culture minister, Miki Zohar, calling for their citizenship to be revoked, and accusing them of “treason against the state”.

The far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, called the directors “a disgrace”, while the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, condemned the film as “intolerable”, saying it portrayed the Israel Defense Forces as war criminals.

On Tuesday, the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, said the military would “not allow IDF soldiers to be made targets through lies and blood libels” and would use “every tool at our disposal” against the film. The Israeli television channel i24 later reported that the military had opened a leak investigation and was seeking assistance from Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security and counterintelligence agency. The agency would respond only after receiving a formal request from the military prosecutor, who would probably first consult the attorney general, the channel reported.

Netanyahu posted a video which included an old clip of Abraham confronting a soldier in the occupied West Bank’s South Hebron Hills, an area where Israeli forces have repeatedly been accused of supporting settlers during attacks on Palestinians. In the video, the Israeli PM says: “The same director who produced that terrible film that slanders IDF soldiers”.

On Wednesday, far-right Israeli journalists, influencers and activists escalated their threats against the two film-makers. Right wing activists were organising protests outside addresses linked to the directors and their colleagues.

This comes after the Channel 14 journalist Yehuda Schlesinger said the directors should be “pursued” or “hunted” wherever they went, and prevented from returning to Israel. He urged Jews in Israel and abroad to make clear that what he described as “25 minutes of antisemitic applause” in Venice would come at a “heavy price”.

A rightwing activist with tens of thousands of followers separately called for protesters to target Abraham’s family and associates, saying “we’ll show him ‘collateral damage’”. He shared a photograph of Abraham’s mother and sought information about the director’s return flight so supporters could “welcome” him at the airport.

A mural appeared in Ashdod depicting Abraham and Szor with crosshairs, horns, swastikas and the word “traitors” emblazoned over the top. A video showing its creation was shared by the far-right rapper Yoav Eliasi, who has more than 750,000 followers on Facebook.

As the threats against the directors intensified, film-makers and human rights groups voiced support for the pair.

In a joint statement, 43 local human rights organisations urged Israeli authorities to stop what they described as incitement and threats against the film-makers, and not to prosecute either them or their sources.

“The institutional response to the film and the threats against its creators are characteristic of dictatorial regimes,” said the statement, signed by groups including Peace Now, Adalah, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel and Breaking the Silence.

More than 1,500 Israeli film-makers have also signed a petition defending “freedom of expression and creation” and expressing solidarity with Szor and Abraham.

“In recent days, we have witnessed an unprecedented smear and incitement campaign against the film-makers, with the line between this rhetoric and physical violence or threats to their lives narrowing rapidly,” the petition said.

The signatories said the role of art and journalism was to reflect society and encourage debate, “even when facing a harsh reality”, and called for the film to be released in Israel so audiences could judge it for themselves.

Szor and Abraham won an Oscar for their previous documentary, 2024’s No Other Land (co-directed with Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal), which spotlighted Palestinian resistance in the occupied West Bank.

The NGOs called for a “thorough” investigation into the high number of casualties in Gaza, particularly among civilians, and for journalists to be granted unimpeded access to the territory, from which Israel has largely barred foreign reporters since October 2023.

Prominent figures in international cinema have also expressed solidarity with Abraham and Szor. Laura Poitras, who directed the 2015 Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, about the whistleblower Edward Snowden, called the threats by Israeli government officials “a threat to journalists worldwide”.