As “NAZA” begins its U.S. theatrical release, opening at Laemmle theaters in Los Angeles this weekend, another film is gaining momentum: “NAZA: The Real Story,” made in response to the controversial documentary that has angered many people in Israel.

The new film challenges the accusations against the IDF by directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. It offers a dramatically different account of the war in Gaza, featuring interviews with IDF commanders and intelligence officers who describe what they say they witnessed and experienced during the war: tunnels beneath children’s beds and cribs, weapons and ammunition hidden inside huge teddy bears, and Hamas training rooms inside mosques stocked with weapons. The film also features operational footage and materials collected during the war.

“NAZA: The Real Story” focuses on the IDF’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties while fighting Hamas, portraying an army that takes extensive precautions before carrying out strikes. It argues that this is particularly challenging because Hamas operatives wear civilian clothing and operate from within civilian areas, making it difficult for Israeli forces to distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Behind the 48-minute film are three friends: Lt. Col. (res.) Roi Danino, Israel advocacy activist Ariel Averbuch and Hagay Gutman.

Gutman, who directed and edited the film, worked on it for only 12 days before its release. He said he could not simply sit by and do nothing while “NAZA” defamed what he called the most moral army in the world.

“The film makes blood libels,” he said in an interview with Channel 14 in Israel. “It drives me crazy that there are people who are tarnishing the reputation of our soldiers who sacrificed their lives. The people who went out on Oct. 8, put their lives aside, fought and did everything so that we could sit here now. We wanted to show the truth, to show it without apologizing.”

Gutman said he wanted to show what Gaza really looks like — “a hornet’s nest of terrorists” where, he said, everywhere you turn, you find terrorists and ammunition: in schools, kindergartens, mosques, hospitals and private homes.

One of the film’s central messages is that the IDF operates under strict rules designed to minimize civilian casualties. The commanders interviewed describe a lengthy process behind every strike, involving intelligence gathering, legal review and multiple levels of authorization. When a potential target is located near a school, hospital, clinic or mosque, they say, commanders cannot simply order an attack. There must be evidence that the site is being used for military purposes, and strikes in sensitive areas require additional approvals that can take hours or even days. At times, they say, a military unit had already left the area by the time approval was obtained, making the strike irrelevant.

The film also documents what it presents as the extraordinary difficulty of identifying Hamas operatives on the battlefield. Its commanders describe Hamas fighters moving through neighborhoods in jeans, T-shirts and baseball caps, usually pulled low to hide their faces, deliberately blending into the population. One commander explained that soldiers can sometimes suspect that a person is a Hamas operative but still be unable to fire until that individual actually opens fire.

The film backs up those accounts with footage showing weapons and Hamas infrastructure hidden in civilian settings. Among the examples are anti-tank missiles found in a children’s room under a Smurfs rug, a kindergarten filled with weapons and covered with photos of children wearing Hamas uniforms. Hamas training compound located next to a kindergarten, and a shaft in the middle of the kindergarten’s yard. According to one of the commanders interviewed for the film, when IDF forces entered the area, two Hamas terrorists emerged from the shaft and fired an RPG, wounding five soldiers. Nearby, a playground funded by UNRWA is shown with a Hamas flag, while bags of rice and flour bearing U.N. markings were allegedly used as makeshift protection.

The commanders also describe Hamas as exploiting humanitarian aid and civilian areas. The interviewees said that Hamas seized supplies intended for civilians by force and prevented people from leaving combat zones, while embedding its fighters among the population. The result, they say, is an almost impossible dilemma for Israeli forces: determining who is genuinely a civilian, who is pretending to be one, who is acting as a proxy and who is a Hamas operative.

But the bigger question is whether “NAZA: The Real Story” will actually reach the audiences it is trying to influence. The film was released for free online and has already received over 30 million views, but there is no way of knowing exactly who those viewers are — whether they include people unfamiliar with Israel’s side of the story, journalists and opinion leaders, or primarily viewers who already support Israel and want some reassurance that Israel is on the right side. 

That challenge is particularly significant given the extraordinary reception “NAZA” has received in Italy. Following its theatrical release there, the film topped the Italian box office, even surpassing the rerelease of Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame.” It grossed approximately $1.2 million in theaters on Monday and Tuesday alone, compared with about $400,000 for “Avengers: Endgame” during the same period. Its Italian distributor, I Wonder Pictures, initially planned only a three-day theatrical run, but extended it after strong advance sales and high demand.

The creators of “NAZA: The Real Story” made the film using their own resources. Some may dismiss it as Israeli propaganda simply because it presents Israel’s side of the story. But the film was not funded by the Israeli government, and its creators say their goal was not to produce a rebuttal for its own sake, but to put forward evidence and testimony that were missing from “NAZA.”

People often assume that a documentary tells the truth simply because it is presented as one, but every documentary is shaped by the choices of its creators — what they include, what they leave out and how they frame the material. That is the central challenge that Gutman, Averbuch and Danino pose to Abraham and Szor’s film – that there is another story that they simply chose not to tell.

“When you make a film in air-conditioned studios, far from the front line, it is very easy to arrange reality in black and white,” the narrator says in Gutman’s film. “It is easy to edit, easy to omit, and easy to create a false narrative about the most moral army in the world. But the truth is not found in editing rooms — it is found in the alleys, inside children’s rooms that were turned into rocket storage facilities, behind shafts dug beneath beds and inside the pit at the Kirya — the place where every operational decision is weighed against the scales of law and morality, even when facing the most brutal enemy.” 

When I heard that “NAZA” got a 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize, it seemed this response was not organic. I watched “NAZA” on Sept. 30 in a Manhattan theater with an audience of about 60 people.  There was no standing ovation, though one man shouted, “We f—ing did this!” I think he meant America.

“NAZA” gets its title from the Israeli phrase for “Nezek Agavi,” or collateral damage. But “Collateral Damage” doesn’t have the same ring as “NAZA,” which as pro-Israel influencer Hen Mazzig pointed out, sounds like a cross between “Nazi” and “Gaza.”

The documentary has not a single official document nor a single person interviewed by name, or with a visible face. There are 24 people purported to be from Israeli intelligence, and their faces are darkened out. The largest claim is that it was approved to kill up to 500 Palestinian civilians for one Hamas target.

Had director Yuval Abraham been a serious documentarian interested in truth, he would have asked: Who was the target? Was it the Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar or Mohammed Deif? He doesn’t ask. This allows Israel to look more evil.

Documentaries can be one-sided. They can include anonymous subjects. But to have every source be anonymous, to not name a single specific person targeted, and not name a single specific day of an attack demonstrates the director does not prioritize a truthful and serious look at what has taken place.

Genocide?

The ad for the film refers to “mass killing” and not genocide which is odd considering this has been the claim by many. For most of the film, there is no effort to claim there was a genocide. Ironically, showing that Israel was calculating the collateral damage, as well as one scene factoring in who had left after warnings, points to the evidence that it was not a genocide. Perhaps Abraham was troubled by this. He was able to get one subject to say it was a genocide. He doesn’t say it in a confident way, nor does he describe why it is a genocide. What did the other 23 intelligence officers have to say on this issue? 

Clip of Pres. Herzog’s Speech Is Edited To Demonize Him

On Oct. 12, 2023, Israeli President Isaac Herzog took questions from the media. “NAZA” includes a clip of him saying, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible” in reference to Palestinians.  Herzog did in fact say this sentence, and this clip is used to imply he meant all Palestinians should be killed. This is false. Abraham is betting that viewers are too lazy to go watch the actual press conference in which Herzog said some civilians were involved in the attack on Oct. 7 and decades ago could have risen up when Hamas staged a coup against Fatah. But in the press conference Herzog says Israel would be following international law. Asked again by a journalist if he will be holding the civilian population responsible, Herzog said they would abide by international law and every operation is reviewed legally. “NAZA” wants its audience to think Herzog said the IDF would act holding every Gazan responsible for Oct. 7, when this is false. Abaraham knows most viewers will not go check the source material.

I did not expect there to be scenes of Shani Louk’s corpse being spit on in the back of a car, half-naked and dead, or the Bibas children in tiny, child-sized coffins. We get that. But why not show scenes of Palestinian parents suffering at the loss of their children? Ask any American to name one Palestinian killed, and other than Hind Rajab, they likely won’t be able to name one. Why did Abraham not take the time to educate the world on the names of a few Palestinians killed, if he wants people to care about their suffering?

Netanyahu as the Only Obstacle to a Peace Deal

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is running again in elections on Oct. 27. It is no coincidence that the film comes out near the election. That’s fine. The film presents Netanyahu as someone who is an obstacle for peace. People are free to feel that he is or is not. But I’d like Abraham to let the world know what deal would be accepted by Hamas if Netanyahu had offered one. The answer? None. Hamas is only mentioned a couple of times in the film, downplaying its existence and atrocities while placing most of the blame on Netanyahu and Israel. Abraham doesn’t ask any of the 24 subjects if most Israelis no longer support  in a two-state solution after Oct. 7 because the answer would be “yes” and it would not allow him to paint the picture of Netanyahu as uniquely evil. And of course, Abraham does not include the clip of Hamas official Ghazi Hamad saying Hamas will do Oct. 7 again and again and are prepared to “pay the price.” He knows most viewers will not do their own research. Of course, there is also no clip of a Hamas official explaining that the tunnels were only for Hamas fighters not civilians.

It Appears that the Director Wants Israelis to Be Viewed as Nazis 

Abraham said in interviews he did no attempt to verify anything said by the people he interviewed. He has also said Israel has too much power and he hopes his film will help level the playing field through international pressure. One subject in “NAZA” says he could never understand how the Nazis did what they did, but now he does. There isn’t much elaboration, but it’s enough to light the fuse. 

Jonathan Glazer is an executive producer of “NAZA.” Glazer, who is Jewish, directed “The Zone of Interest,” a movie that erased Jews from the Holocaust and showed Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife going about their business as if Jews were not being slaughtered nearby.. At the Oscars, Glazer said that the film was meant to confront the present, not merely the past, and he said, ‘We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation …” None of these ideas are new. They go back to Soviet propaganda from 1964-67 to make Israel go from being perceived as the David to the Goliath.

That Nothing Is Verifiable Is the Point

There is also a claim that an entire building was taken out because a low-level Hamas operative was there. Who was the operative? What was the building? When was the attack? Of course, these questions are unanswered. There is also a claim that Israel could have killed Hamas members in the daytime, but instead chose to kill them with their families. Once again, no names or dates are given. It goes without saying it is better to kill as few civilians as possible. Specific cases should be investigated in all wars, including this one. The film relies on throwing things up in the air, hoping they will land hard, because many in the public are uninformed and predisposed to believe the narrative that Israel is evil. 

What Will Be the Impact of “NAZA”?

It’s been reported the film could be streamed for free in November. Calls for the two Israeli directors to have their citizenship revoked will only have the result of making people more interested in the film and imagine there must be some incriminating evidence. It’s a poorly made propaganda film that would have had far more impact if done in a way that took journalistic standards into account. I will be curious to see the reaction of the Palestinian community and if they are offended by not being included. Critical thinkers who watch the film will raise the questions I have, but a majority of people watch documentaries not for the purpose of learning something new, but to reinforce the narrative they already believe, whether it is fact-based or not. “Naza” is not successful on any level as a documentary, but if judged on awards, and getting people who were already angry angrier, it very well may be.