At the Venice Film Festival, the Gaza documentary NAZA received a roughly 25-minute standing ovation and won the Special Jury Prize.
Even its title announces the film’s frame. NAZA is a Hebrew military acronym meaning “collateral damage.” The film was directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Before most of the public had seen it, it was already being promoted as an exposé of Israel’s “calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians.”
That is not a question being investigated. It is a verdict being announced.
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The film’s criticism of Israel is not the problem. Its evidence is.
The evidence problem
NAZA relies heavily on testimony from 24 anonymous Israeli military and intelligence personnel. Whistleblowers sometimes need anonymity. But anonymity raises the burden of corroboration because viewers cannot independently assess a source’s role, access, or reliability.
A detailed review of the film’s sourcing found that viewers often are not told an interviewee’s precise role, proximity to the event described, or whether several witnesses independently corroborate a particular allegation.
Consider the film’s most explosive claim: that approval was once given for a strike expected to kill 500 civilians to eliminate one Hamas target. Yet the film reportedly supplies no date, target, or location. The Israeli military says no such strike was ever planned or carried out.
Even the subtitles deserve criticisms. In one example, a statement that “Ahmad and his entire family” were in a home reportedly becomes “Ahmad and his entire family will die.” Those are not trivial differences in a film accusing a military of systematic killing.
Context is evidence, too
Civilian casualties are not, by themselves, proof that civilians were deliberately targeted. Israel did not enter Gaza in a vacuum.
On Oct. 7, Hamas-led attackers, other armed groups, and some civilians from Gaza attacked Israeli communities, murdered civilians, burned homes, abducted people, and committed sexual violence. An independent U.N. investigation found that civilians from Gaza directly participated in attacks and abductions at Be’eri, Nir Oz, and the Nova festival.
Israel knew from the first day that roughly 250 people had been dragged into Gaza, some already wounded. The details of their treatment emerged over time, but the danger did not. Hostages were held incommunicado and later found or reported in tunnels, residential buildings, and other civilian locations.
As I have argued previously in these pages, acknowledging that some Palestinian civilians participated in Oct. 7 does not make every Gazan guilty. But erasing that participation distorts the battlefield Israel confronted.
What, exactly, was Israel supposed to do? Leave its hostages in Gaza? Allow the people who murdered and abducted its citizens to disappear into tunnels and prepare another attack?
By its very nature, war is ugly. Hamas and other armed groups fought from dense civilian terrain while hostages were hidden within that same environment. That does not relieve Israel of its obligations under the laws of war. It does mean civilian casualties cannot honestly be assessed without considering who created the battlefield and how it was used.
Warnings carried a severe military — and human — price
One fact is especially difficult to reconcile with the portrait of a military indifferent to civilian life: Israel repeatedly warned Gazans before major operations and strikes.
The Israeli military used phone calls, text messages, leaflets, and evacuation instructions, and established routes intended to move civilians away from combat.
Those warnings carried a severe military price: surprise. Warn civilians that an attack is coming, and Hamas hears the warning too. Fighters can move. Commanders can escape. Weapons can be relocated. Defensive positions and ambushes can be prepared. Israeli soldiers may enter an area where the enemy has had time to get ready.
But another clock was running as well: the hostages.
Every delay intended to give civilians more time to leave was also more time in which Israeli captives remained beyond rescue. It gave their captors additional opportunity to move them, conceal them, or expose them to further injury or death.
Israel knew that tradeoff from the beginning — yet repeatedly chose to warn.
Retired U.S. Army officer and urban-warfare scholar John Spencer has argued that Israel adopted extraordinary measures to reduce civilian casualties. Other experienced military officers have reached similarly strong conclusions. Their views are not dispositive, but they belong in the evidentiary picture.
NAZA also portrays artificial intelligence as central to the killing process. The Israeli says strike decisions were made by human personnel rather than AI. That does not prove every safeguard worked properly. But if the filmmakers contend those safeguards were largely meaningless, they must demonstrate it.
Democracy cuts both ways
Israeli officials who have threatened the filmmakers’ citizenship are wrong. A democracy should answer disputed accusations with evidence, not punishment.
The fact that Abraham and Szor are Israelis does not authenticate their conclusions either. Israel, like America, is a democracy capable of producing some of its government’s fiercest critics. Citizenship is not corroboration, and freedom to accuse is not freedom from scrutiny.
If stronger evidence emerges, Israel should confront it. But Venice delivered its verdict first.
A standing ovation is not corroboration. An anonymous witness is not 24 independent witnesses. An algorithm that helps organize intelligence is not necessarily an algorithm that decides whom to kill. And civilian casualties are not, by themselves, proof of criminal intent.
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Context is not an excuse. It is part of the evidence.
NAZA asks the world to judge Israel. The world should first judge the evidence behind NAZA.
Arie Blitz, M.D., M.B.A., is a retired physician and independent writer in Weslaco, Texas, who writes on foreign policy, medical ethics, and public policy.