After its much-reported Venice premiere, Israel’s culture minister is vowing to strip citizenship from the two Israeli filmmakers behind “NAZA.”
In the doc, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor interviewed 24 people whose faces and voices were digitally altered to protect their identities, many of them Israeli military and intelligence whistleblowers, who describe the purported use of AI-powered targeting systems in Gaza that they say killed Palestinian civilians.
Israel’s military, the IDF, says the anonymous sources in the documentary, whose faces we do not see, “cannot be verified,” and that the allegations are “categorically false.” Its main argument is that the film rests on testimony from people whose identities, service records, and involvement can’t be confirmed, and that some claims concern strategy “clearly beyond the knowledge of junior-level soldiers.” The IDF called the film’s claim that a strike was approved with up to 500 expected civilian deaths “completely false.”
Israeli Minister of Culture and Sports Miki Zohar called the documentary’s victory at Venice “shocking” and accused its creators of a “betrayal of the state.”
“The self-loathing that burns in the creators, who are willing to harm their homeland just to get applause from anti-semites around the world, is inconceivable,” Zohar said Sunday in a post on social media, adding that he would “act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of” both filmmakers.
Zohar has “contacted the Director General of the Population Authority and the Director General of the Ministry of Interior to examine the denial of Israeli citizenship” to the documentarians “for breach of trust for the country and cooperation with the enemy, and to examine how the materials were obtained, who is behind them and whether in the framework of their attainment or publication, actions have been carried out that can help the enemy in time of war.”
Abraham and Szor previously shared a 2025 Oscar for “No Other Land,” about Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, which they co-directed with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. They will be back in the Oscar race this year with “NAZA,” which, much like their last film, might have to go the self-distribution route.
“You are a disgrace and an embarrassment to the entire people of Israel. Go away!” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said on X. “I am certain that your friends, that is to say our enemies Hamas in Gaza, will welcome you with open arms.”