NAZA is a 2026 British documentary film written and directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Produced by The Guardian and JW Films, it investigates the integration of artificial intelligence and automated surveillance in military targeting systems used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the ongoing Gaza war and genocide. Its title is derived from (), the Hebrew military term for collateral damage.
The film premiered in the main competition of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on 10 September 2026, where it won the Special Jury Prize and received critical acclaim, going on to secure theatrical distribution in over 50 territories. It will be theatrically released in the United Kingdom by Dogwoof on 16 October, followed by a global streaming release on The Guardian'''s website in late November.
Despite not having had a theatrical release in Israel, the film elicited political controversy there due to its accounts of the country's actions in Gaza, and prompted threats against Abraham and Szor, who are Israeli citizens. The Israeli government and the IDF rejected the claims presented in the film.
Synopsis Between 2023 and 2025,NAZA. In: labiennale.org (abgerufen am 24. August 2026). Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor conducted nighttime interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers on rooftops in Tel Aviv. Shown only as dark silhouettes with distorted voices to protect their identities, the interviewees describe the AI systems and mobile phone surveillance used to identify targets in Gaza and their role in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians. Interspersed with the interviews are shots of Tel Aviv at night.
One soldier explains that "NAZA" is a military acronym for (), meaning "collateral damage". Each potential target, such as an individual Hamas member, is assigned a NAZA value representing the expected number of civilian deaths from an air strike. According to the interviewee, targets with values below 20 required no special authorization, while approvals could be granted for values as high as 500. The combined NAZA values of potential Hamas fighters exceeded Gaza's total population.
During preparations to drive Palestinians from northern Gaza, maps used color-coded quadrants to distinguish inhabited areas (purple) from destroyed ones (white). An interviewee says the objective was to turn the purple squares white, "like a video game", with instructions to destroy as much as possible before questions about the legitimacy of military operations could arise.
"Death zones" were designated from Tel Aviv, and Palestinians learned their boundaries by being shot when they entered them. One interviewee recalls Israeli snipers firing on starving people at a food distribution point and illustrates the incident with a stick-figure drawing.
Most interviewees describe killing from a distance as routine office work. They say the most reliable targets were often not Hamas fighters themselves but their homes, where their families were present. AI-assisted surveillance of mobile phones across Gaza was used to locate them, with intelligence personnel reportedly able to access phones' cameras and microphones, including those of children. One interviewee calls this system a "factory of targets".
The phrase "Where's Daddy?" refers to using a hacked child's phone to determine when her father would be home, allowing an air strike to kill the entire family. One interviewee describes the practice bluntly: "You hack her phone, and then you kill her." Another recalls listening live through a Palestinian father's phone as his daughter, whose photographs were stored on the device, burned to death. One interviewee says the ability to hear everything happening inside people's homes made him "feel like God".
Several interviewees say the mass killing of civilians was not only accepted but viewed as a duty, reflecting the widespread post-October 7 belief that there were "no innocents in Gaza". One says that killing Palestinians and carrying out the mission "felt good"; although psychological support was available, no one in his unit needed it. Another states, "We kill these children deliberately".
A member of an elite unit compares the experience to the Holocaust, saying that he now understood how it is possible to destroy an entire building, with all the people inside it, and then to carry on as normal and "complete your degree in clinical psychology". Asked whether he had participated in a genocide, he answers "yes" without hesitation.
Production Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor previously co-directed No Other Land (2024), which focused on Israeli settler violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank, and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film, before collaborating on NAZA.
The film is a British production, co-produced by The Guardian and British film producer James Wilson's JW Films. It is executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, in association with Placeholder Films and Unseen Hand. Abraham explained at the press conference held to mark the film's premiere in Venice that, while the events in Gaza are not the same as the Holocaust, there is a common pattern – that of dehumanisation. This, he said, is what the film aims to show.
Release
The film had its world premiere in the main competition of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on 10 September 2026, where it competed for the Golden Lion. It was the only documentary selected for the festival's main competition, and was only added on 24 August, following consideration of safety concerns about its screening. The film received a 25-minute ovation, the longest in the history of the Venice Film Festival. It was announced as a late addition to the sidebar section of the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival. Its North American premiere took place at the Main Slate of the 2026 New York Film Festival on 26 September.
French distribution company MK2 Films handled world sales rights and secured theatrical distributors in 56 territories, among them France, UK, Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Canada, Brazil, Turkey, Central America, and the Middle East. The film was also offered to distributors and cinemas in Israel, and The Guardian said it was exploring possibilities to show it in the occupied Palestinian territories. It was released in the United States on 30 September 2026, with The Guardian and MK2 opting to self-distribute. Elastica Films secured distribution rights in Spain, programming a 9 October 2026 theatrical release in the territory. Dogwoof acquired U.K. and Irish distribution rights to the documentary, scheduling a theatrical premiere on 15 October 2026 before a general release the following day. The Guardian has announced that, following its theatrical release, the film will be made available free of charge for streaming on its website in late November 2026.
Reception
Box office Released in Italy on 28 September 2026 by (marking the film's first theatrical outing), NAZA grossed around €1.1 million in the first two days of its theatrical run, topping the Italian box office and surpassing the opening weekend gross of Avengers Endgame: Encore there, resulting in more screenings being added beyond the originally scheduled three days. As of 7 October, it has grossed $3.4 million in Italian cinemas.
In the United States, the film was self-distributed by The Guardian and MK2, starting on 25 September 2026. As of 4 October it has grossed $83k in 1 theater. It is due to expand nationally on 9 October.
Critical response On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 100% based on 39 reviews, with an average rating of 8.9/10. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 93 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
The British Film Institute review concluded the film was "a devastating watch, especially having so many of your darkest thoughts and suppositions confirmed, but there’s no turning away from what’s said. In those long shots of people in apartments watching TV or doing yoga, one wonders if Abraham and Szor are showing us the voters responsible for these policies or pointing at all of us." Justin Chang, reviewing the film for NPR, said that the interviewees' "testimony is riveting", and that "[t]he most radical thing about NAZA isn't that it exposes the machinery of death; it's the film's insistence on the value of Palestinian life." Chang expressed "enormous admiration for Abraham and Szor's courage in holding their government to account". The film was a critic's pick in The New York Times; reviewer Manohla Dargis said it was "tough to watch, and impossible to ignore".
John Bleasdale, writing for Time Out, said, "NAZA puts together a restrained, intelligent, articulate, precise and utterly damning case against Israel’s actions in Gaza and their ongoing actions through the region. As a work of cinema, it is exemplary. As a work of journalism, it is inarguable. As a document, it is an indictment. " Robert Daniels awarded 3.5 of 4 stars on RogerEbert.com and described the film as "another confirmation that genocide is happening". Mark Demetrius, writing for Australian film magazine FilmInk, commented: "Stats are one thing, and personal recollections are another. 'You hack her phone and then kill her'’, says one of the interviewees—the 'her' in question being a 12-year-old girl. And even with most of their features obscured, and a 'response' of pure silence, you can’t miss the intense feelings of another interviewee when asked 'How could you bomb when you heard a baby crying inside?'" Sam Adams wrote in Slate that the film's "real strength—a strength that is particular to filmed documentary—is in X-raying the psyches of the people onscreen." The Toronto Star's Peter Howell described the film as "heartbreaking but essential viewing, questioning the systems that cause and quantify civilian death in modern warfare."
New York magazine's Rachel Corbett and German public broadcaster MDR's René Martens wrote that the film's central claims – routine acceptance of 20 civilians killed for low-ranking Hamas members, with exponentially higher, three-digit figures accepted for medium- and high-ranking Hamas figures – had previously been reported by the Washington Post, the New York Times, +972 and scholars as far back as 2024. Richard Brody said in The New Yorker that the film had "turned Abraham’s previous reporting into front-page news, a center of conflict in its own right. That’s the very definition of art—if it’s any good at all, it sparks a significant emotional response—and the difference between art and journalism is of exceptional importance in discussions of “NAZA,” given the political and moral stakes of its revelations. The outcry it has provoked is a reflection of the filmmakers’ accomplishments and risks in making the film."
IDF response