Miki Zohar accuses Oscar-winning filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of “treason against the state” over their documentary on Gaza
Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are facing a new wave of backlash over NAZA, their documentary examining Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the systems used to carry it out.
The film’s recent recognition at the Venice Film Festival has now put its directors in the crosshairs of Israeli officials.
The Filmmakers Are Being Threatened With Losing Their Citizenship
Israel’s culture minister Miki Zohar has said he intends to move to revoke the Israeli citizenship of Abraham and Szor, accusing them of “treason against the state” over NAZA.
In a post on X, Zohar called the documentary “vile” and said the filmmakers were willing to “harm their homeland in order to receive applause from antisemites around the world.”
“I will act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state,” he wrote.
The threat came just days after NAZA premiered at Venice, where it received the Special Jury Prize and a reported 25-minute standing ovation — one of the festival’s longest ever.
Zohar was not the only Israeli official to attack the filmmakers. Far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called them “a disgrace and an embarrassment to the entire people of Israel” and told them to “go away.”
Former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman also called Abraham and Szor “haters of Israel”, while former prime minister Naftali Bennett described the film as “a horrific blood libel against our sons and daughters.”
The citizenship threat is particularly significant because Abraham and Szor are not newcomers to politically charged filmmaking. In 2025, they won the Oscar alongside Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal for No Other Land, which documented Israeli settler violence and the displacement of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Now, NAZA has brought them back into the spotlight and this time, the backlash is coming with a threat to their citizenship.
So, What Exactly Is NAZA About?
The 80-minute documentary looks at the technology, intelligence systems and decision-making processes behind Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.
Its title comes from an acronym reportedly used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians expected to be killed in a particular airstrike.
Rather than telling the story of the war through politicians or military spokespeople, Abraham and Szor built the film around the people who say they were directly involved in the machinery behind it.
The filmmakers interviewed 24 Israeli military and intelligence insiders, many anonymously, about the systems used to identify targets and facilitate strikes on Palestinian homes.
One source claims that approval was given for an attack expected to kill 500 civilians in order to kill a single Hamas member.
The result is a film less concerned with one particular bombing than with the wider system that makes these decisions possible.
Inside The Technology Used To Target Gaza
A major focus of NAZA is Israel’s use of artificial intelligence and surveillance technology in its targeting process.
The film features testimony about systems used to monitor communications and identify suspected members of Hamas, including the AI-powered system known as Lavender.
The insiders describe a process in which enormous amounts of information are processed to identify potential targets, with decisions ultimately translating into airstrikes on buildings and homes across Gaza.
The film’s approach is deliberately unsettling because it rarely gives viewers the distance of a traditional war documentary.
Instead, it takes us inside the process.
Intelligence officers describe working remotely from Israel while technology helps identify targets hundreds of kilometres away. A drone carries out the strike. Someone else makes another decision. The people affected by all of it remain physically absent from the room.
That distance is part of the film’s argument.
“They Know The House They Are Bombing Is Full Of Children”
For Abraham, the idea that technology creates emotional distance from violence only tells part of the story.
The people working within these intelligence systems, he argues, can have detailed information about what is happening on the ground.
“Sure, it’s easier to kill people when you’re doing it on a screen,” he said.
But he added that intelligence officers can know exactly who is inside the buildings being targeted.
“They know the house they are bombing is full of children,” Abraham said. “They can hear babies crying. They still order another strike.”
That tension runs through NAZA: the film is interested in how responsibility can become fragmented across an enormous military system, with each person able to see their own role as only one small part of something much larger.
One interviewee describes himself as a “small cog.”
Another recalls the “insane fun” of planning airstrikes.
The language itself becomes part of the film’s examination of the system. Civilian deaths become numbers. Targets become data. Human beings become what the military terminology describes as collateral damage.
The Question Behind The Film
The documentary was secretly filmed over three years on rooftops across Tel Aviv, with the identities of those interviewed concealed through digitally altered voices and appearances.
The filmmakers are less interested in presenting their interviewees as cartoon villains than in asking how people become part of a system capable of such large-scale destruction.
One former soldier recalls visiting Holocaust sites as a child and wondering how ordinary Germans could have participated in Nazi crimes.
“I still see the Nazis as evil,” he says. “But what does that mean I am?”
It is one of the film’s most confronting moments because it turns the question inward.
NAZA is ultimately examining more than military technology. It is asking what happens when violence becomes bureaucratised, automated and divided into hundreds of individual tasks — and whether that division makes it easier for people to distance themselves from the consequences.
From No Other Land To NAZA
For Abraham and Szor, this is not their first time documenting Israeli violence against Palestinians.
Their previous documentary, No Other Land, was made with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal and focused on the destruction of Palestinian communities and settler violence in the occupied West Bank.
The film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2025, bringing its filmmakers international recognition while also making them targets of fierce criticism in Israel.
Following the film’s premiere at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, Abraham’s family home was targeted by a rightwing mob.
Szor has also spoken about the personal cost of making the films. Some members of her family and people close to her were angry and ashamed of her work after the Oscars.
For her, however, that reaction is a price she is willing to pay.
A Different Kind Of Risk
Abraham has been more publicly vocal about the political environment surrounding the films, while Szor has largely remained behind the camera.
Speaking about NAZA, Abraham acknowledged that making the documentary carries risks for both filmmakers — but stressed that those risks are not comparable to what Palestinians face.
“We’re taking risks in a system that privileges us,” he said, describing Jewish-Israeli supremacy as a founding characteristic of the system.
He pointed to the stark difference between the threats faced by Israeli filmmakers and the dangers faced by Palestinian journalists attempting to investigate Israeli military operations from inside Gaza.
“Imagine if a Palestinian journalist in Gaza tried to do what we did and called up senior Israeli officials,” Abraham said. “There is no comparison. They would most likely be murdered.”
When The Filmmakers Become Part Of The Story
With NAZA, Abraham and Szor set out to document the machinery behind the violence in Gaza. But as the film gains international recognition, the filmmakers themselves have increasingly become part of the story.
The contrast is hard to miss: while audiences in Venice gave the documentary a 25-minute standing ovation and the jury awarded it a Special Jury Prize, Israeli officials are calling for its directors to lose their citizenship.
For a film about the people, technology and decisions behind a system of violence, the backlash surrounding NAZA has become another reflection of the questions it raises — about who gets to document that violence, who gets to challenge it, and what happens when they do.
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