In NAZA, IDF soldiers detail mass killings in their own words

"It's so insanely fun." "It's like a video game." "You understand that your goal is to destroy."

Shrouded in darkness on balconies in Tel Aviv, this is how Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers describe their work.

They are speaking to Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham under the expectation of complete anonymity for fear of retribution from the system they were once — or still are — embedded in.

NAZA is the latest project from Abraham and Rachel Szor, one half of the filmmaking team behind the Academy Award-winning 2024 documentary No Other Land, which showed the destruction of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank.

NAZA premiered this year at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize and received a 25-minute standing ovation.

In the film, 24 interviewees detail — sometimes with shame, sometimes with pride — the intricate surveillance and technological systems used by the Israeli military in Gaza.

The war has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians since the 2023 October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

One interviewee in the film said: "After October seventh everyone kept saying, 'There are no innocent people in Gaza.'"

"This notion spread throughout the army and suddenly we are toppling entire buildings. It wasn't even an issue."

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) has rejected such claims, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to strip Abraham and Sozr of their citizenship and pursue defamation charges.

The filmmakers have been unable to return to Israel and are residing in the UK.

It took Abraham and Sozr three years to gather the NAZA interviews and research from more than 100 confidential sources.

"We've made sure that every major claim in the film has multiple sources — in some cases more than a dozen sources who are backing up that claim," Abraham told the ABC.

"So, we feel very confident about the truth of what the soldiers are saying in the film."

What is NAZA?

NAZA is an Israeli military acronym for collateral damage, or, according to one interviewee, the number of civilians likely to die from a strike.

"We say 15 NAZA. We don't say 15 people killed and certainly not that 15 children and women will be killed. We say 15 NAZA."

Another interviewee asserts that Israeli forces work off "NAZA maps" that allow them to see potential civilian bombing victims.

"Twenty NAZA became the benchmark. We'd take down lower ranks in Hamas without a second thought. They were official orders," he said.

Another interviewee said he was part of a strike that involved the approval to kill 500 civilians "for one human target".

"The targets are like a video game because everything is done remotely," he said.

Many consider themselves "cogs" in a machine, stuttering or falling silent when Abraham pushes them to recognise the numbers as human lives.

"One soldier in the film says, 'No matter what we do, they deserve it,'" he says.

"There's something about when so many people in society normalise this violence. Soldiers talk about it in the film, that [the dehumanisation] becomes like the water you swim in."

What is Lavender?

NAZA interviewees explain how the IDF uses an AI system called Lavender to process huge amounts of surveillance data to identify bombing targets.

Every building in Gaza is numbered and every storey in every building is accounted for.

Targets for large-scale attacks are identified via the Lavender algorithm.

One interviewee said Lavender had earmarked up to 70,000 phone numbers.

"Every such phone that we located, we could bomb," he said.

But he said Lavender "made a lot of mistakes".

"It once marked an 80-year-old woman. They bombed her house with her entire family in it. This bothered the intelligence community on a professional level," he said.

"The intelligence officer said he was willing to risk being wrong 15 per cent of the time."

Where's Daddy?

A section of NAZA titled Where's Daddy? details the military "consensus" to use surveillance data to target private homes at night.

"There is a serial number for every private home in Gaza … 'Where's Daddy' is a mechanism of alerting us when an operative comes home. We'd spy on the family to know when the father comes home," one interviewee said.

"I hack into the phone of a 12-year-old girl. If a girl says, 'Mummy, when are you returning home? Daddy just came back', that's a message that would alert the system because it contains the words 'return' and 'daddy.'"

"You hack into her phone and then kill her."

Another interviewee said: "We would use the phones of family members to hear them in their homes before bombing it."

"I'd hear the final moments of a person's life."

One man described searching for photos of a Palestinian man's house in his phone's photo gallery to find bombing access points. Instead, he found a selfie of the man with his two daughters, smiling on his balcony.

"The IDF bombed that place but he had already left his apartment and only forgot his phone there. The two girls were there … I saw that these were little girls between three and six years old," the interviewee said.

"I remember I heard a woman crying and screaming on the phone that her daughter's body was burning. The daughter was still alive, she was begging someone to come save her."

The man confirmed the girls died. He was unsure what happened to their father.

'Annihilation Zone'

Some interviewees corroborate UN reports, including those related to the forced displacement of civilians.

"At one point the army decided to flatten entire areas … inside my unit the destruction was viewed as strategic," an interviewee said.

"The goal was to try and destroy as much as we can before we lose international legitimacy. We 'cleaned' it — you wouldn't even believe there was ever civilisation there.

"I sat in meetings with senior officials talking about moving the whole population from northern Gaza to the south with no intention of allowing them to return. We would burn every house we entered. Every house. It didn't matter. We wanted to make sure they wouldn't return."

An interviewee said Palestinian civilians were killed if they crossed into an unmarked zone the IDF had claimed.

"No-one was ever armed. Whoever you decided to kill was considered a terrorist … we never collected the bodies. The dogs eat them," he said.

Another corroborates UN reports of Israeli snipers shooting Palestinians lining up for food distribution.

Towards the end of the documentary, an interviewee tries to reconcile his view of what the Nazis did with his own actions.

"I thought they were just pure evil, but today I understand it. I understand how a man can blow a place up and go home to his degree in clinical psychology. I still see those Nazis as evil, but what does that mean I am?" he says.

Abraham says his aspirations for NAZA reach further than Palestine and Israel.

"It's helpful to understand the mechanisms that allow individuals to participate in such crimes because they are universal mechanisms," he says.

"It's not an evil that is only rooted in something connected to Israel or the Israeli society — it's something that has occurred and will re-occur throughout history.

"We should try to understand how human beings can do this to other human beings, because that is one of the ways in which we can hopefully prevent or minimise the chance that these things will happen again."

What is Israel's response?

Netanyahu has called for the prosecution of the 24 interviewees in NAZA, who he has accused of spinning "a false, misleading and biased narrative".

Abraham said the reaction would have a chilling effect on journalism.

"[For] Netanyahu … it's about making sure that there will be no more Israeli soldiers and officers who do this again, who will speak out about what they've seen," he said.

After NAZA's Venice premiere, the Israeli government promoted a film titled Naza: The Real Story, which mimics the rooftop interviews of Abraham and Sozr's documentary and claims Israel has "the most moral army in the world".

"It's a bit frustrating. They're free to make any film they want, but it's misleading because they made it the same title and the same on the rooftops and it's clear they're trying to mislead audiences into thinking that the film that they've made is our film," Abraham said.

"Listen to the testimonies of the soldiers in our film and you're free to listen to the more spokesperson version of that and make up your mind which sounds more credible and which testimonies match what we've seen on the ground in Gaza more.

"To me, I think the answer is quite obvious."

NAZA will open in select Australian cinemas from October 15 before being released in totality for free via The Guardian's website in late November.

No cinemas in Israel have agreed to show it.

Abraham says it would be an exaggeration to say "the society is beginning to reconcile or reckon with what has happened in Gaza", but that among the denials and death threats the filmmakers have received, he has seen "small cracks" of anger and outrage.

"I'm not naive," he says.

"I know the overwhelming majority reaction is going to be hostile, but I'm hopeful that these small cracks in the walls of denial will perhaps widen a little bit more."