Transcript of The Israeli Film Directors Pushing for a Reckoning in Their Home Country New

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From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. The Special Jury Prize goes to Naza by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Sazour. The documentary Naza received widespread acclaim when it premiered last month at the Venice Film Festival. It won a top prize, and it got a record-breaking standing ovation for 25 minutes. But reception for the film in Israel could not be more different. The 2 Israeli directors are being accused of damaging Israel's reputation in the world and of betraying their own country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he'd propose legislation that could revoke the filmmakers' citizenship. All of this, despite the fact that the film has not been released in Israel. Naza investigates the methods that the Israeli army used in Gaza in the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7th. From dark rooftops in Tel Aviv, The film features testimony from 24 anonymous military intelligence officers and soldiers.

They deserve it.

They discuss both the military policies that led to the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and their part in it. The Israeli military has pushed back on the film, saying that it misrepresents its efforts to avoid harming civilians. And so today, we speak to the directors of Naza, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Shor, about their film and about how they're pushing for a reckoning in their home country. It's Monday, October 12th. Rachel Shore, Yuval Abraham, welcome to The Daily.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I think it's sort of fair to say that the two of you are experiencing some extremes. Your film, Naza, got a standing ovation. Actually, it was a record-breaking standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. And at the same time, the film, even though most Israelis are not seen it, because it hasn't been released there, has inspired a lot of anger back in Israel. Rachel, for example, I understand that there have been protesters outside of your family's house.

Yeah.

So I just want to ask you guys both just how you're doing, how you're feeling in this moment.

Yeah, it's been intense. The response has been very aggressive towards the film. You know, the demonstrations next to my parents' house were calling to hang us, like a lot, a lot of violence towards us. But I think we also feel that it at least also creates some sort of conversation about what we have done and doing in Gaza, because for the last 3 years, there hasn't been any conversation about this. And just to say that we made this film in Hebrew with testimonies of the soldiers because we want to reach the Israeli society.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, that's what I try to hold on to as some kind of meaning in all of this, that in— as Rachel was saying, in the conversations that have now been sparked as a result of the film. And I think, you know, part of the reason why we made this film is to try to make sense of the extremely large number of civilians that were killed by our country, by Israel, in Gaza. But yeah, it's not an easy situation. I mean, we want to go back home to Israel, which is our home, but we can't go back. Netanyahu just a few days ago said that our film is like ballistic missiles being targeted at Israel.

Hmm.

I mean, there's a total atmosphere of incitement. The death threats have been so many that People who love us, like our parents, our friends, everyone is telling us, don't come back. Like, it's not— it's not safe for you right now to go back.

I want to talk about the film that has inspired all of this now. The premise of the film, the way you actually made it, is actually kind of simple. It's you, Yuval, on rooftops in Tel Aviv at night talking to 24 different Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers about the war in Gaza. And the conversations, if I may, seem to be really about 2 things. On the one hand, they are about the casualties, the civilian casualties in Gaza, and the tools that the IDF uses, such as AI and mass surveillance. But the film is also very much about how these folks that are talking to you are explaining and justifying what they have done, both to you and also, it feels like, to themselves. And I think it'll be helpful if we can start with perhaps Yuval explaining the title of this film, which is Naza. Can you just walk us through what Naza means?

Naza stands for nezek ha'gavi. These are 2 words in Hebrew that can be translated as collateral damage in English or incidental damage. The way in which Israeli intelligence officers use this term is to indicate the number of civilians that they expect will be harmed at a particular airstrike. It's like a euphemism, it's a substitute for saying human beings.

Mm-hmm.

So if an airstrike has an anticipated number of 15 civilian casualties, meaning 15, you know, women, men, children who are not the target of the strike, but the army knows it will likely kill them or harm them, then they use the word Naza. They use this word collateral damage. So they won't say 15 men, women, children, they say 15 Naza or 20 Naza.

The word, as you mentioned, is euphemistic, and we're going to get into what points your film makes about that word. I want to just talk first about the people in the movie. Can you just tell us a little bit more about who these 24 people are and the roles that they played?

Of course. So these are 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, all of whom were involved in either the mass surveillance or the remote killing of Palestinians in Gaza. They have varying roles. Like different degrees of seniority and different roles within the army. Most of them belong to the so-called Israeli intelligence community.

Just to be very clear, these are not folks who are mostly in Gaza. These are folks who are operating for the military from within Israel.

Yes. And these are individuals who, generally speaking, come from upper, middle upper class, relatively good education. Many of them are secular. They don't necessarily belong to the kind of families who would vote for Netanyahu or for Ben-Gvir or for Smotrich.

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, of course, are right-wing Israeli politicians, just to say.

Yes, absolutely. So these are individuals who are part of Israel's liberal elites. That is the kind of profile, I would say, of the people who are doing this remote surveillance and remote killing.

And a lot of these soldiers, officers, are considered leftist, and you can connect it to Tel Aviv, which is a city that is considered as the liberal capital of Israel. And as you see in the film, actually, in the heart of the city, there is the main headquarters of the army. So some of these operations are actually being operated from there. And Tel Aviv is only 40 miles away from Gaza, but you can almost not tell that these things are happening from that city.

I want to get to the revelations in the film. So let's talk about what the film actually revealed, what these conversations revealed to you. about how the Israeli army targeted members of Hamas in Gaza after the October 7th attacks on Israelis by Hamas?

Well, it's a film packed with revelations, but I think one is the, the way in which the targeting systems that were used by Israeli intelligence to look for these Hamas members specifically looked for them inside private houses. And You know, when you want to bomb so many targets, houses are a very convenient place because people come back home to sleep in their house.

Mm-hmm.

One officer describes a system called Where Is Daddy? Which spied on the family members of these targets through mass surveillance technology and waited to get signals or alerts that they are coming back to their houses.

Mm-hmm.

And it seems important to note, these are not houses where military activity had to be taking place. On the contrary, so it was much more difficult to find Hamas members when they were engaged in military activity, or even when they were just walking around. There was something about waiting for the individual to come home, when they're sleeping at night, which was just easier. And to me, this decision to bomb people in their houses is part of the reason why we saw thousands of Palestinian families being just killed, wiped out, multiple generations. The babies, the toddlers, the children, the women. I mean, the majority of them were killed inside residential buildings.

The reason why I think this moment stood out to me, this particular revelation, was because it sort of complicated the narrative that you often hear from Israel that Hamas uses human shields and operates out of civilian infrastructure like hospitals and schools, for instance. And your film does not dispute that, just to be very very clear, but the point that it is making is that the IDF targeted people in their homes because that is where they could find them. You know, you, they would go home and put their cell phone next to their bed. And if the IDF was tracking the cell phone, then it would know where this person was. And it was not necessarily, as you said, because Hamas was operating out of that house. And so targeting the person in their house often meant killing a person's family. And in that way, it complicates Hamas using human shields.

Yeah.

Yes, these buildings were not being bombed because there was Hamas military activity happening from those buildings. So it wasn't as if someone was launching rockets or a sniper sitting on the roof. It's just easy to get them in their houses. They go home to sleep. And we designed a system predicated on mass surveillance that routinely and systematically on a massive scale marks those places, those private houses, as a target.

And we have this image of an intelligence officer sitting, looking at a screen with air conditioner in the room, and really knowing what they're doing, but they actually opening the phone of the targets, or actually also of their family members, and they can hear what's happening inside the house. One of the soldiers described they would actually hear what's happening before, and then also what's happening after they bomb. They would hear a conversation between a couple, a baby crying.

Were you surprised at that level of surveillance, at that level of sort of intimacy that the film claims to be happening?

Yeah, I think it was surprising because it kind of breaks this image that you have of how much the soldiers know before and after they bomb the families.

The film makes some claims about how the Israeli military uses AI. Yuval, you have been writing about the war since it began as a journalist. You were among the first journalists to write about the use of AI. And I wonder, Yuval, if you just want to explain that a little bit.

Yes. So the way it worked, according to sources that we've spoken with, is that the army had a group of individuals that they believed were part of the Hamas military wing, and then they had a machine learning algorithm that kind of learned the way in which the phones of these individuals behaved and identified identifying features.

Mm-hmm.

So it could be, for example, you know, other people are saving them on their contact lists as Hamas members, or these are phones that are often in the vicinity of Hamas training compounds, or these are phones that repeatedly change their phone number because that's how militants may operate. And then it scans the phones of almost every single person in Gaza who has a phone, and it gave them a rating based on how similar their phone patterns were to that existing group of people who were identified as Hamas and PIJ members by Israeli intelligence. And what sources tell us in the film is that this AI-based list of Hamas members in certain areas of the military was used without needing to verify it further. So it was used as like a sole incriminator, even though the people designing it and the military knew that it had an error rate.

Mm-hmm.

But, you know, to, to me, the main issue here with AI is not the mistakes. I think the main issue with AI is the scale that it enables. When you have AI that can just mark, you know, tens of thousands of so-called targets, junior targets, that's Nobody in the army probably even remembers what their names are. And instead of spending, you know, an hour in order to bomb one house, you can designate dozens of houses for bombing with little human involvement.

One of the claims in the movie that has gotten a lot of attention and criticism is this claim from one officer in particular that one strike on a Hamas target was approved with the knowledge that as many as 500 civilians could be killed or injured. The Times has reported before, my colleagues here at the paper have reported on how the Israeli military has loosened its restrictions on how many civilians can be endangered in a specific attack. And we have reported that in certain instances, approval has been given to kill or injure more than 100 people, but 500, as stated in your film by this one person, goes farther than what The New York Times has reported. It's also something that the IDF, we should note, has specifically disputed. And I just want to understand from you both, how did you corroborate that specific claim from this person?

This is a film that was done in collaboration with The Guardian, with the investigations desk at The Guardian. We would have not put in this testimony of that soldier if we were not fully confident that it's true. And if we did not have— and we do have multiple other sources who have confirmed that number. And we also have specificity. that we've just not made public yet about when that strike took place, where it took place. We understand it's an explosive claim. And the fact that there is, you know, one person in the film speaking about it, it does not mean that it has not been, you know, verified by multiple people that we've spoken with.

I guess what I'm really getting at is if you did all this work to corroborate such an incendiary claim, if you had other people telling you the same thing, Why not put an indication of that homework in the film? Because there are a lot of people that you probably want to reach with this movie who are gonna look for any reason to dismiss the claims in this film. And I wonder if you think that like in hindsight, perhaps it just would've helped make people more receptive to what you are trying to tell them.

Uh, no, I think that the film makes its case very, very convincingly. And the film has a kind of language as well. I mean, there is no narration in the film.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, it's also a work of cinema, and as a device, we don't— it doesn't use that, you know, uh, disclaimer, we have 4 sources, which is a very journalistic device that I do use often when I write an investigative story, uh, in, in written text. But all I can say is that we are very confident. Of course, people can always pick and choose what to focus on.

Sure, of course.

But I think a good faith person who listens to the film should feel that it is bulletproof. And as I said before, the claims that are made in the film are claims that we have verified from multiple sources.

Yuval, did you go to the IDF with these claims before the film came out, before coming out with the movie?

We went to the IDF over 3 years. We've written, as I said, over a dozen articles about the Israeli military's firing policies, about the way in which they use technology and surveillance technology. And we approached them for comment every single time.

Hmm.

And the film reflects the gist of the IDF and the Israeli government's position with regards to this through Netanyahu. I mean, we juxtapose, we interweave Netanyahu throughout the film, speaking about defending the Israeli bombing campaign. And we, yeah, that's there.

Yeah. In public statements, the Israeli military has said that the film presents, quote, a distorted, misleading, and disingenuous picture. It says that the army and its commanders devote, quote, exceptional effort and detail, end quote, into assessing and trying to mitigate harm to civilians while fighting Hamas, including by canceling planned attacks. The military also says that legal advisers review proposed airstrikes to ensure that they comply with international law. Any violations, it says, are investigated. After the break, we speak with Yuval and Rachel about the psychological impact of the war. On the officers and the soldiers who appear in the film. We'll be right back.

I'm David Sanger. I cover the White House and national security at The New York Times. A good deal of reporting is still about serendipity. I've done this for 4 decades now. You build up experience that gives you a sense of how to be in the right place at the right time. I happened to be at the White House one day when a somewhat chance encounter with President Trump led to our 4-hour-long interview that gave us a real vision into how the president thinks about using power and whether there are any limits on his own capabilities. My colleagues and I try to explain not only what's happening, but why it's happening, not by word of mouth, but by actually being there. Questioning, reporting, uncovering realities that are not obvious. If you want to make sure you get your news closest to the source, consider subscribing to The New York Times.

These officers, at least to me, it feels like they were really grappling with the role that they were playing in the war. And one thing that comes across really strongly is the distance, right? The distance between the people in the film and the actual act of killing. And I wonder if you both feel like one of the reasons why that kind of distance developed, or was allowed to develop, at least initially, was because of how horrendous the October 7th attacks were, the taking of the hostages, who were not released for a very long time. We know, of course, that that created this huge psychological trauma in Israeli society. And I just sort of wonder, like, how that affected the mindset of the people you spoke with when they first entered the war.

Yeah, absolutely. Of course it had a huge effect. It's a huge trauma for Israeli society. The massacre was horrific. There was a lot of anger. There are soldiers in the film saying how, you know, how they felt after the October 7th attacks and need to go to the army and need to do something. Of course, there is a context of trauma. I mean, there are people that I know that were killed and murdered on that day, on October 7th. It cannot— it does not justify the razing down of entire cities in Gaza to the ground, massacres that have happened again and again at food sites, the shooting of unarmed civilians that are trying to go back to their destroyed neighborhoods, the murder of so many people, like the killing of more than 73,000 people, most of them civilians. And I think, to me, there's always this fine line between context and justification, right? Because context is not justification. Just like we say the same thing about October 7th, it's completely unjustified. Of course, you can talk about context, you can talk about Gaza being under siege, and you can talk about Palestinians living under Israeli occupation without a state for— but none of that justifies a massacre of civilians, the killing of people dancing at a party, the kidnapping of children.

It's horrific.

None of us should accept something like that. So we should be careful in this line between context and justification, and we should always be careful when speaking about any crime, whether it was committed against Palestinians or against Israelis.

I wonder how you felt their mindset changed as the war went on, when they got a little bit of, at least in terms of time, distance from the October 7th attack. Can you just describe a little bit how people may have changed their point of view about the civilian casualties or their attitude towards civilian casualties in Gaza?

Well, I think the people that we've spoken with obviously changed their attitudes over time because they came in and they slowly realized, you know, okay, we came into the military after October 7th, but we are now involved in very, very severe crimes. There is this moment in the film where one of the officers says, I'm focused on this individual that I want to kill inside the house.

Mm-hmm.

And I don't think about Anything that happens on the way, and there's a moment where he says, "But actually, we we know that these children are there. We know that they are going to be killed." It is intentional, and there was a moment when when he just sort of realized that. אתה היום חושב שזה רצחם? כן, ממש. He's an officer who who says he believes he took a part in a genocide. Coming from the perspective of an intelligence officer that works inside this framework of targets and collateral damage, I think a lot of them said, well, look, we're not saying that the civilians are the target, but the end result is going to be the same end result. It's the calculated and anticipated killing of countless civilians, of entire families.

And we should say that Israel, of course, has vigorously denied any claims and accusations of genocide. Rachel, you were the cinematographer on this film. Just visually, how did you think about how to underscore the idea of distance in the shots that you showed from daily activity in Tel Aviv?

Yeah, so basically what you see in the film in between the interviews is you look inside people's apartments, you see the life of Tel Aviv inside the apartments. And I think one of the things things that we decided to concentrate on and to show is also something that was very, very strong in the Israeli society after the 7th of October and also before, which is watching the news at 8 o'clock. It's like some sort of a ritual. Everybody sits and watches the news. And the channel that you see that most of the people are watching, it's the mainstream media. And also, you hear a bit the way they're describing what Israel is doing in Gaza, and they use like terror targets. The words they use are also showing some sort of a distance. So, I think that was also, yeah, part of the choice of focusing on the life of people in their apartments.

Rachel, I want to ask one last thing about the look and feel of the film. As we have already mentioned, it is mostly shot with Yuval speaking to your sources on rooftops in Tel Aviv. But there's one scene from Gaza, really one moment, at the end of the film. And to the point about trying to combat the dehumanization of Palestinians, That's the work you're trying to do here. I would love to hear about how you thought about how to use footage from Gaza, specifically the decision to use it so sparingly and only at the end of the movie.

We just couldn't take the risk of people finishing the film and not understanding the full gravity of what is being said. It's not some sort of a reflection film of soldiers talking from their memories far away. I mean, these things are still happening now, so I think we just couldn't It was important for us to include it and to make sure that each viewer that will finish the film will see the result of all the systems of killing that were described throughout the film.

The killing in Gaza continued and continued for 2 years up until the ceasefire of October 2025. And to some degree, it is still continuing to this day. There's been over 1,000 Palestinians killed since that ceasefire.

One person in the film actually compares what he has done to the Nazis. And I wanna focus on this for a second because that is such an inflammatory thing for an Israeli to say. And I, I'm just sort of curious about your choice to include it.

Yeah. He wasn't the only one, by the way, who says that they thought about, they thought about the Second World War and they, and they thought about the genocide of the Jewish people. And he described growing up, you know, in the Israeli education system and thinking about the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the perpetrators of crimes as, as pure evil. And he could not understand understand how one would do it. And he says in the film, well, I feel like I have— I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but he says, I have a better understanding now of the role of the perpetrator. And I think that this is not at all, it's not to make a simplistic comparison. I don't think there is any comparison between the Holocaust and what happened in Gaza. I don't. But I do think that there is an importance there of thinking about Again, without making a simplistic comparison, without saying that it's the same, it's not the same, but there are common patterns of dehumanization. As the soldier was saying, there are things that we can learn about being a perpetrator and understanding that better in order to prevent crimes from recurring in the future, which I feel are important.

The way I kind of looked at it was that we're in this moment right now where the world, a lot of the world has this incredibly negative view of Israel. Antisemitism is on the rise. Many Israelis feel like they are in this existential battle for survival. I wonder how you feel about this larger criticism that this movie could be seized on by people who are interested in talking about things completely irrelevant to what the film was actually talking about, that it basically could feed antisemitism, as I think sort of the thing that's being unspoken here.

I'm terrified of antisemitism. It is on the rise. You're absolutely right. There are horrible bad faith actors on the right, but also on the left. And I hear that. And I'm not trying to dismiss that at all, Rachel, really. But I think at the same time, I will say that I don't think that should stop us from being truthful and factual. So I think, what are we saying here, that we cannot report about these facts because they, you know, it may increase antisemitism? There is a responsibility to be very clear, to oppose antisemitism completely. It's appalling. But that cannot seep into not being truthful and factual as a journalist. Just as, by the way, you mentioned October 7th. Imagine someone saying, well, if we report about the atrocities that Hamas has committed, and they have committed horrible atrocities, the massacre, the kidnapping of children, by reporting on that, by journalists doing their work and reporting on that, they would be making the Israeli response in Gaza much more lethal, much more vengeful.

Sure.

They will. We just, as journalists, we just need to be truthful to reality, and we should take into consideration and into account what you're saying. We shouldn't dismiss it. But I think that is our role.

You both, at this point, are very recognizable. You mentioned that you're not in Israel right now, but you hope to go back. Obviously, there are these very looming safety concerns. But I would imagine that, like, walking down the street, people can spot you, people can say things to you. If you're talking about wanting to go back at some point, what do you imagine your life to be like? Just even trying to resume, I don't know, anything resembling what your life looked like before this movie?

Well, it's a good question. I've been thinking about it myself. The honest answer is that I don't know. I think we will go back eventually, and I hope that I can continue my work as a journalist and as a filmmaker. And if it means I can't walk as freely as I could before in certain areas of Israel that are more right-wing, then that's maybe a price that I will pay. I'm not the only one. I mean, people are constantly paying very heavy prices for the work that they're doing, much heavier than this kind of price. So I don't want to act the victim. I mean, we— I'm not. Like, we did something that we believe is important and we believe is true and people should watch it. And we know that sometimes these kinds of things can come with a certain price.

Mm-hmm.

Israel is our home. And like, our work has been motivated and is motivated by a sense that we want to change, you know, we want to change the place. We want policies that we disagree with to change, and we want the place to be better for Israelis and for Palestinians. And I want to see this place that I was born in to be a place not where there is people dying every day and horrible violence and stress. And it's really, it became the Holy Lands, you know, Israel, Palestine. It can be a better place. And I do think that there will be no future to anyone if we do not have an honest reckoning with the present and with the past.

Yuval Abraham, Rachel Shore, thank you so much for spending so much time with us.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Rachel.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The capitals of Saudi Arabia and Yemen were both hit in a series of strikes on Sunday, a day after Saudi Arabia suffered its deadliest attack in over a decade. In that attack, the Houthis, the Iran-backed militant group, struck an international airport in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, killing at least 12 people and injuring more than 300. It was one of several fatal attacks by the Houthis on the airport this past week. Shattering Saudi Arabia's sense of safety and remove from its war with neighboring Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been waging a bombing campaign against the Houthis that has killed 91 people since September 3rd, according to the Houthi-run health ministry in Yemen. And President Trump said on Friday that he had reached an agreement with Russia to immediately import Russian diesel fuel to the U.S. market, an extraordinary development between the 2 countries after years of American sanctions on Russian energy exports during the war in Ukraine. The move is an attempt by the Trump administration to contain soaring energy prices due to the war with Iran, one of the biggest political liabilities for Republicans heading into next month's midterms.

Energy experts, however, say the deal is not likely to have a major impact on the cost of diesel. Today's episode was produced by Ricky Nowitzki and Clare Tennisgetter, with help from Carlos Prieto. It was edited by Maria Byrne, with help from Paige Cowitt and Rob Zipko. Research help by Susan Lee. Contains music by Dan Powell and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Wonderly. Special thanks to Aaron Boxer-Miller, David Halbfinger, Yara Bayoumi, and Isabel Kirschner. That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow. This week on The Wirecutter Show, we are inducting longtime favorite product into our new Hall of Fame. Why should people care about this ice cream scoop? Well, do you eat ice cream? That's one, you know. I think they've been a pick since 2016, so around 10 years.

I don't think I would change anything about this tool.

I mean, I can still give you the model number in my sleep. Find out what makes these top picks so special on The New York Times app or wherever you listen.