Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor‘s NAZA had been hyped over the last several days as an allegedly devastating documentary about Israel’s Gaza genocide.
But it feels too dry and succinct. It’s about Israeli horror but it doesn’t feel horrible. Because it holds back. It plays less-is-more cards.
Primarily shot on highrise rooftops in Tel Aviv, the 80-minute doc basically records several anonymous Israeli military or intelligence figures (visually and verbally concealed, cloaked in darkness) as they talk about AI-augmented killing systems intended to murder Palestinian civilians.
Abraham quote: “The goal was very simple — we wanted to hear, in as much detail as possible, how the systems of killing in Gaza looked like, how they operated.”
The doc’s title is a euphemism used by Israeli intelligence “to indicate the number of civilians that are expected to be killed in an airstrike.”
Yes, we understand — perpetrators of mass genocide are coldly calculating. Routinely devoid of any sense of morality, much less empathy. Arid constitutions go with the territory.
News bulletin: War is cruel, merciless and morally repugnant.
Excerpt from HE’s Hind Rajab review:
When we watch films about holocausts and mass murders, we naturally expect to be shocked or emotionally torn apart. This is how I (mostly) felt while watching Kaouther Ben Hania‘s The Voice of Hind Rajab at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. The response inside the Sala Darsena was palpable. I could hear subdued sniffling.
Alas, I felt very little while watching the emotionally minimalist NAZA this morning. There was clearly respect in the room. A fair amount of moderate applause was heard, obviously indicating agreement that the Israeli government perps (i.e., the Bibi Netanyahu cabal) are monsters. But I wasn’t sensing obliteration. NAZA is no Hind Rajab.
“Hind Rajab’s life is at extreme risk, of course, because of (a) Hamas’s suicidal fanaticism and (b) Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to wipe them all out, down to the last combatant.
“Innocent civilians, after all, have been in the collateral line of fire and savagely murdered throughout history. When has this never not been tragic or horrifying?
“How many terrified little girls died because of the aggressive battle strategies of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington, William Tecumseh Sherman, Adolf Hitler, George S. Patton, Omar Bradley and William Westmoreland?
“And how many little German girls died, by the way, from bombs dropped by Lieutenant Colonel James Stewart, who was the flight leader for a massive thousand-plane attack upon Berlin, and who also helped bomb the shit out of Frankfurt, Brunswick, Bremen and Nuremberg?”
Wikipedia says…
Estimates of German civilians killed by Allied strategic bombing during World War II generally range between 300,000 and 500,000, with some broader academic estimates reaching up to 600,000.
Civilian casualties of the Gaza war:
As of 8.28.26, 74,582 Palestinians have been reported killed in the Gaza war, according to the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) and Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A study by OHCHR found that 70% of the Palestinians killed in residential buildings or similar housing were women and children.”
Total Iraqi civilian deaths during 2003 Iraq war and Desert Storm:
Estimated Iraqi civilian deaths were roughly 2,300 to 3,500 during the 1991 Desert Storm (Gulf War) and over 100,000 to hundreds of thousands during the 2003 Iraq War and its aftermath.
Nazi holocaust of WWII:
Approximately 6 million Jews were murdered in Nazi concentration camps, alongside millions of Romani people, Soviet prisoners, people with disabilities, political dissidents.
Japanese civilian deaths from U.S. bombing during WWII:
An estimated 330,000 to 500,000 Japanese civilians died from U.S. conventional and atomic bombing during World War II. Firebombing air raids on more than 60 Japanese cities resulted in roughly 241,000 to 350,000 civilian deaths. The single deadliest raid was the March 9–10, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo (Operation Meetinghouse), which killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people in one night. The atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted in an estimated 90,000 to 166,000 deaths in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 deaths in Nagasaki by the end of 1945.
Not to mention the Soviet Mass Killings and the Holodomor (1932–1933), the Cambodian Genocide (1975–1979), the Armenian Genocide (1915–1923), the Rwandan Genocide (1994).