'Why didn't you broadcast it?': 'NAZA' director claims Israel did not cover Gaza civilian deaths

NAZA co-director Yuval Abraham accused Israeli media of ignoring Gazan civilians’ deaths for the entirety of the Israel-Hamas War after the film got significant pushback for its framing of the war in an interview with Israel’s Channel 13 on Monday.

NAZA, which is an IDF acronym for “collateral damage,” alleges that the military approved or planned strikes with AI assistance that killed hundreds of Gazan civilians. The IDF has denied the allegations.

In the interview, journalist Raviv Drucker pressed Abraham on why he did not identify the sources in the documentary.

“I have to tell you that as a journalist, I don’t think I would have aired this,”  Drucker said, accusing Abraham of having “no supporting evidence.”

“We don’t have their names, we don’t have their units, to know that they were really exposed to the information that they’re talking about. We don’t have the dates of the events, places, who was hit. We basically have nothing to hold on to, to refute or confirm the grave testimonies.”

Co-director of NAZA alleges that Israeli media did not cover IDF's collateral damage policy

Abraham refuted Drucker’s questioning, noted that the documentary was published in partnership with The Guardian, and added that the interviews were more specific.

“This is a Guardian film, made in cooperation with a leading publication, with a staff of editors who had access to the raw materials,” Abraham said. “The identities of the people were verified, the cases they discussed were verified.”

He then pressed Drucker as to why Channel 13, or any other Israeli outlet, did not air allegations made by the 24 IDF Intelligence Corps officers the film interviewed.

“Why didn’t you broadcast?” Abraham asked Drucker. “Three years in the [Israeli TV news] investigative programs, there wasn’t even one item, if I’m not mistaken, that dealt with the rules of engagement in Gaza, that dealt with the collateral damage policy, that researched in-depth the damage to innocent Palestinians’ lives in the Strip.

“You say [our film] wasn’t complex enough. Okay. So why didn’t you broadcast something complex yourself?”

IDF: NAZA's claims about collateral damage policy are 'completely false'

Notably, NAZA has not been made publicly available in Israel. The IDF has also not allowed journalists to enter Gaza without a military escort since the start of the war in Gaza.

In one promotional clip of the film, one of the IDF intelligence corps. members who were interviewed were asked about the largest number of anticipated civilian deaths ever approved for a strike in Gaza.

"I don't know how many were killed, because they never check this, but there was once an approval for 500," the purported soldier said.

In a statement on X/Twitter, the IDF Spokespersons’ Unit called the information in the interview clip “completely false.”

“The IDF has never planned, approved, or carried out a strike in Gaza in which 500 civilians or anything near that number were anticipated to be killed. Nor was any credible claim raised throughout the war suggesting that an IDF strike had caused anything near that number of fatalities,” the IDF wrote in a statement on X/Twitter.

“The filmmakers couldn't possibly verify this claim; there is no real supporting evidence, and yet they published it anyway. Additionally, nothing about the interviewee, not his service nor his role, can be independently checked and verified.”

In response to NAZA’s claims regarding AI, the IDF said that “decisions regarding the selection and approval of strikes in the IDF are made by human personnel only, in accordance with IDF guidelines, and not by artificial intelligence.”