In this documentary, Israeli military and intelligence sources reveal systems, policies, and practices that have resulted in high numbers of civilian deaths and widespread destruction.

In November, 2023, and April, 2024, the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham wrote a pair of articles about the high number of civilian casualties in the attacks that Israel launched in Gaza in response to Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023. In these pieces, which appeared in English in +972 and in Hebrew in Local Call, Abraham (who discussed his work with my colleague Isaac Chotiner after the second piece appeared) reported that these civilian deaths were the result of specific policies of the Israel Defense Forces. The I.D.F. had adopted a broad definition of legitimate human targets and was using A.I. to select them; it intentionally destroyed nonmilitary buildings and had chosen to accept a high level of collateral damage. These pieces received some attention, including criticism from the Israeli government and other journalists, but the response fell well short of public uproar.

Now Abraham has turned his research into a film, “NAZA,” co-directed with Rachel Szor, which has garnered an altogether different kind of response. (The title is a shorthand for the Hebrew nezek agavi, meaning “collateral damage,” commonly used in Israeli military circles.) It premièred on September 10th at the Venice Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Prize; last week, it was shown in a press screening at the New York Film Festival, ahead of its public screenings there on September 26th and 27th. (It will open at IFC Center on September 30th and go into wider release on October 9th.) This time, the pushback—much of it from officials and journalists who haven’t yet seen it—has been strident and furious. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is proposing legislation to “revoke the citizenship of anyone who defames I.D.F. soldiers”; his culture and sports minister, Miki Zohar, has called for an investigation into whether Abraham and Szor received information from Hamas and thereby committed treason. The I.D.F. chief of staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, ordered the Military Advocate General to consider prosecuting the filmmakers and the movie’s participants. Protesters outside Szor’s parents’ house have clamored for the filmmakers to be executed.

In the media, the film has been criticized for allegedly being biased against Israel in its reporting, for failing to center the October 7th attacks, and for downplaying the difficulties involved in combatting Hamas’s use of human shields and tunnels. Even some critics of Netanyahu have voiced concerns: while acknowledging Israeli cruelty toward civilians in Gaza, they argue that the film is a journalistic failure because of its reliance on anonymous sources and its lack of additional evidence. In response, Abraham has asserted the rigor of the editorial process that the movie, which is produced by the Guardian, went through, and has detailed how its sources’ identities were verified. He attributes the Israeli public’s shock over “NAZA” to the way that, since the start of the war, the country’s media has continued to emphasize the trauma of October 7th while paying little attention to civilian suffering in Gaza.

“NAZA” has turned Abraham’s previous reporting into front-page news, a center of conflict in its own right. That’s the very definition of art—if it’s any good at all, it sparks a significant emotional response—and the difference between art and journalism is of exceptional importance in discussions of “NAZA,” given the political and moral stakes of its revelations. The outcry it has provoked is a reflection of the filmmakers’ accomplishments and risks in making the film.

Both of Abraham’s articles relied to a significant extent on unnamed sources, notably soldiers and intelligence officers. “NAZA” (which is in Hebrew, with English subtitles) involves only anonymous sources, or, rather, sources anonymized by the filmmakers. The film mostly consists of Abraham’s on-camera interviews with twenty-four sources who were serving or had served in military or intelligence capacities in the Gaza war. Abraham interviews them at night, shrouded in darkness, on rooftops of buildings in Tel Aviv; he never mentions their names, and their faces and voices are digitally altered to keep their identities hidden.

The sources describe how the term “NAZA” is used and how the system operates. Alleged Hamas operatives are assigned a NAZA number, representing how many civilian deaths are acceptable as collateral damage. In many cases, an A.I.-based system called Lavender helps choose whom to target, by analyzing vast amounts of data. Israel has absolute control of communications systems in Gaza, and thus absolute power of surveillance. According to one interviewee, Israel can tap into the microphones and cameras of any cellphone in the territory, and another says, “You feel a bit like God because you hear everything they say.” On the basis of such data, the Lavender system can come up with a profile of “how a Hamas operative behaves,” involving patterns of phone calls. Every building in Gaza, a source says, is numbered, and the floors in every building are counted. Once Hamas operatives have been identified and their homes pinpointed, officers sometimes tap family members’ phones to figure out when a target will be at home. (It’s usually at night.) Because monitoring the calls of children for such words as “Daddy” and “return” has proved particularly effective, the tracking protocol has acquired the macabre nickname “Where’s Daddy?” (The I.D.F. has said that it “categorically rejects” the allegations in the film, and that its decisions about strikes are made by “human personnel only.”)

In Abraham’s articles, the information provided by sources was the subject. In “NAZA,” the emphasis shifts: the sources, by speaking, become subjects themselves. Abraham and Szor are also the co-directors, with the Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, of the 2024 documentary “No Other Land,” centered on the West Bank village of Masafer Yatta as it was attacked by Israeli settlers, with the support of the I.D.F. That movie, which won the Oscar last year for Best Documentary Feature, is essentially a direct depiction of live action, a kind of observational reporting. “NAZA” is, in another way, a film of immediate action: the speaking of what those in power want to keep silent. Although the movie is keenly informative, its focus is less on the information divulged than on the people who are using these systems—who are following these protocols, who are taking actions that they know will result in the deaths and injuries of noncombatants, including children—and who want to make these systems known and the experience of working within them known. Rather than conveying military action solely in the language—and the euphemisms—of technicalities and legalities, “NAZA” presents that action in emotional and moral terms. As the sources unfold the intentions, the methods, and the effects of Israel’s war in Gaza, they convey the enormity of rational, bureaucratic warfare. They emerge as ordinary people taking actions that should in no way be ordinary but which have been made ordinary by the system they work within.

One source, speaking of the high NAZA numbers assigned to many low-level Hamas targets, concludes that “you end up with all of Gaza.” Even without adding the word “genocide,” the source’s implication is clear. Another source, describing one instance of “Where’s Daddy?” targeting, explains that, when a particular target happened to leave his phone at home when he went out, the missile launched at his apartment killed his family but not him. The mechanisms of surveillance are such that targeted killings are often audio-recorded and photographed. One interviewee says, “I’d hear the final moments of a person’s life,” and another recalls hearing family members screaming and crying after a child was killed. These acts, to the sources who describe them, are outrages, and in speaking of them, the sources also speak, implicitly or explicitly, of themselves: What kind of people could do this, and what kind of people are they for taking part?

“NAZA” is filmed in Tel Aviv, but the city is more than a setting; it’s one of the movie’s major subjects. The movie includes a montage of historical clips that tell a story of the city, beginning with a groundbreaking ceremony in the nineteen-twenties and going on to evoke the metropolis of the seventies. Throughout, Abraham and Szor show contemporary Tel Aviv by night, from the heights of rooftops, during wartime—a sumptuously modern city, bright with skyscrapers and street lights, and bold new construction, its roads ablaze with headlights and illuminated corporate logos. In what amounts to closeups of the nocturnal face of the city, the camera gazes at apartment windows, through which residents are seen eating, resting, walking, watching television—and some of what they watch on television is news, including Netanyahu and other officials giving speeches and interviews in ferocious defense of the war. In one TV program, the President of Israel says that, after the October 7th attacks, “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

Shortly after that remark is heard, the movie’s sources characterize the mind-set that this view has produced: “We need to erase Gaza”; “Whatever we do, they deserve it.” The military use of A.I. has pursued that aim, sources say, creating a “factory of targets” on a “mass scale.” Some of those targets are individuals; others are architectural. One source describes orders to destroy an entire neighborhood and, with pen and pad, diagrams for the filmmakers the selection and destruction of targets. Several sources produce sketches of this kind, and these onscreen artifacts, accompanying the interviewees’ descriptions, conjure powerful, albeit imagined, visions of war. The goal, as one person says of the plan to empty the north of Gaza and force all inhabitants to the south, is to “make sure they wouldn’t return.” Another, describing the destruction of houses, streets, and neighborhoods, and just about all of the residents’ possessions, concludes, “We erased history.” Someone else calls Gaza “a mass grave.”

At one point in “NAZA,” Abraham and Szor include a telling reference to a key artistic forebear: a shot of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, with a marquee announcing a tribute to Claude Lanzmann, whose epochal 1985 film “Shoah” details the Holocaust by way of interviews—with survivors, historians, even perpetrators. “NAZA” does something similar, and it’s striking that its title is a Hebrew term as internationally unfamiliar as “Shoah” was at the time of that film’s release. Crucially, the two films share their makers’ sense of a documentary aesthetic as an ethical imperative. In both, the bearing of witness is not just a matter of delivering information; it’s dramatic action of great moral moment, and it demands from the filmmakers an artistic and conceptual engagement that goes beyond mere recording. Like Lanzmann, Abraham is often on camera with the film’s participants; like Lanzmann, Abraham and Szor rely on editing, connecting interviews with images of locations, to convey a sense of place. Unlike “Shoah,” “NAZA” is about ongoing events, and those events are happening, in a sense, right there, where the filming is happening; the film pointedly includes an image of the I.D.F. headquarters, in the center of Tel Aviv, and Gaza is only about forty miles away. The Tel Aviv evoked in “NAZA” is a city haunted by silences—by what’s not being said in daily life and mass media, and what the sources in the film are bringing to light.

“NAZA” and “Shoah” also share a sense of cinematic form: the way that the sources’ participation is depicted is as essential as what they say. In “NAZA,” that form is a rigorous and restrained uniformity—the sources’ presence, often alongside Abraham, shown in fixed frames, all more or less from the same angles. These severely patterned compositions (by Szor, who’s also one of the film’s cinematographers) fuse the participants’ disparate perspectives into a single vision, reflecting the overwhelmingly integrated system in which each has played a small part. “NAZA” portrays Israeli action in Gaza as a terrifyingly comprehensive killing machine; though it may not kill everyone, the officers and soldiers involved have a sense that they are potentially killing anyone. Brief concluding clips of documentary footage from Gaza show a father calling into the recesses of a destroyed building in search of his children, bodies protruding from beneath a concrete slab. After the complex chain of causes that the rest of the film has detailed, this final image stands as a single unspeakable effect.

Building on the same body of information as Abraham’s initial articles, “NAZA” adds an expressive, subjective element: the sources’ personal responses. Expressions of pride, duty, and even vengeance that, at first, motivated them gradually fuse into a chorus of horror, regret, and guilt. The military systems, the sources suggest, take on a double role: a strategic one, in the pursuit of specific military goals, and a forensic one affording plausible deniability, masking a war of Biblical wrath as dispassionate rationality. The literal darkness in which sources speak in “NAZA” turns the screen into a mirror of subjectivity, putting viewers face to face with their motives, their responsibilities, their identities.