I viewed the remarkable new documentary produced by the Guardian from the Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor recently, and I have been unable to cease pondering it since. The movie's name derives from a Hebrew military expression for collateral damage, and it features revealing conversations with two dozen Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers seated in shadow, frequently on Tel Aviv rooftops, with their voices "digitally modified to conceal their identities".

At one moment, Abraham poses an unusually direct query to one of the soldiers.

"Do you consider this a genocide?"

"Yes," the soldier answers. "Entirely."

He highlights what he calls the "deliberate" targeting of Palestinian noncombatants, among them youngsters.

"We must portray events accurately." That phrase might function as the film's alternate heading. Because over the past three years, there have effectively been two conflicts in Gaza: the fighting itself, and the battle over permissible descriptions of it.

Has Israel aimed at civilian locations – or does Hamas merely employ "human shields"?

Were Palestinian youngsters intentionally slain – or does even raising that issue amount to anti-Jewish "blood libel"?

Were starving Palestinians fired upon while pursuing meals – or did Hamas bear responsibility for those deaths?

Are most of the Palestinian fatalities truly civilians – or do vast numbers qualify as "terrorists"?

Does the Israeli military's behavior in Gaza warrant parallels to the Holocaust – or does drawing such a parallel itself prove antisemitism?

NAZA stands out because, one by one, Israelis who took part in the surveillance and lethal operations of the Gaza conflict address these matters directly. And their statements prove quite damning.

I have devoted the past several years to debating some of Israel's most dedicated advocates – on the live stages of Open to Debate in New York and the Munk Debates in Toronto, on cable news, and on Piers Morgan's YouTube program.

I hope each of them would take the time to view the full 80 minutes of NAZA. Not because the film offers another case from me. Because it presents testimony from exactly the side they believe they represent.

The 'human shields' defense

Israel and its backers have often asserted that Israel faces the "Hamas human shield strategy" in Gaza, whereby "Hamas intentionally places its fighters among civilian populations".

In NAZA, Israeli military and intelligence voices challenge that position. Hear, for instance, the Israeli source in NAZA who explains the AI-driven approach to locate and then strike Hamas leaders at night, in their residences, together with their relatives. "Hamas employs human shields in certain instances but the human shield argument regarding private homes is baseless. It simply does not hold. We strike them in houses because that is where we locate them," he stated. "They merely return home to rest. That is where we apprehend them."

The civilians were not protecting the target. The target was tracked by Israel to the civilians.

The children

Some have argued that media reports on Palestinian children slain in Gaza amount to "blood libel" and evoke old notions of "the child-killing Jew".

"Inquire how Israel manages to strike innocent children with such lethal precision and no one can explain," the noted British novelist Howard Jacobson wrote. "Inquire why they would choose to strike innocent children … and no one can explain that either."

NAZA resolves the matter: it is not antisemitic blood libel to note that Israel deliberately killed children in Gaza. One Israeli intelligence source recounts the ability to access the phone of a 12-year-old Palestinian girl to determine when her father – the intended target – might come back. At that stage, the residence could be bombed.

Abraham poses the straightforward question. What occurs to the 12-year-old girl?

"You access her phone and then eliminate her," comes the response.

What proves most disturbing is not only the substance of the reply but its tone: steady, straightforward, nearly procedural.

Another Israeli interviewee remembers a boy entering a military-restricted area. "He committed no act," the soldier notes. "They bombed him."

Then follows one of the most disturbing elements in an already disturbing film: according to the soldier, bodies are abandoned for dogs to consume.

So perhaps the question is no longer: why would Israeli forces ever kill children? Perhaps the question instead should be: how much Israeli testimony detailing the killing of children are we supposed to disregard?

The 'terrorist' body count

Some military analysts continue, despite all the deaths, to claim that Israel attained a historically low civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in Gaza, while repeating Israeli assertions that over 24,000 fighters had been eliminated.

Yet NAZA poses a basic issue. Who qualifies as a "combatant"?

Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel describe "annihilation zones" in northern Gaza where Palestinian civilians who crossed unseen lines could be killed.

"Anyone who enters the zone must die," one interviewee reports the troops were instructed.

His unit eliminated 140 unarmed individuals in such zones. Still, he notes, they were tallied as terrorists regardless. "Anyone you chose to kill counted as a terrorist."

The food lines

When accounts surfaced of Palestinians being shot near food-distribution points in 2025, Israel supporters contended that Hamas carried out the shootings.

If they viewed NAZA, however, they would hear Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel casually explain how Israeli military snipers shot hungry and frantic Palestinians who had moved out of formation to crowd the food distribution points like "ants".

One interviewee describes to Abraham how "three distinct groups of soldiers would slaughter the people" as they attempted to reach the food. They made no reference to Hamas.

Comparisons

Supporters of Israel have long resisted parallels between Israel's government and the Third Reich. In June 2026, Haviv Rettig Gur, Israeli journalist and Middle East analyst at Bari Weiss's Free Press, issued an essay headed: "Why the Gaza war cannot be compared to the Holocaust". Gur labeled the parallel an "inversion so harsh it is difficult to accept" and contended that its goal was specifically "to turn the Jews into the Nazis".

In NAZA, a distressed Israeli soldier tells Abraham that he traveled to Poland as a schoolchild, learned about the Nazis from a young age, and questioned how such Germans, the image of "pure evil", could "continue with their lives".

Now, as an adult and as a Gaza veteran, he says, "I comprehend it," disclosing how he and his fellow soldiers destroyed homes in the strip and then resumed their university studies. In a memorable phrase, he says: "I still regard those Nazis as evil, but what does that imply about me?"

Understandably, the comparison elicits especially strong reactions among Israelis, and as Abraham himself noted in a recent Haaretz podcast, he is not seeking a "simplistic and direct comparison". Instead, he holds that the Holocaust offers universal lessons on how people participate in systems of dehumanization.

"He grasped something about acting as a perpetrator," Abraham said of the soldier. "When we invoke the words 'never again', part of that involves recognizing patterns of dehumanization."

Is this Israeli veteran truly involved in a prejudiced propaganda effort? Or does he have something to impart about what occurs when an entire people are dehumanized?

The 'blood libel'

NAZA has elicited strong reactions from officials in Israel.

Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett condemned the documentary as a "terrible blood libel against our sons and daughters". Israel's military chief, Eyal Zamir, also used the term "blood libel".

Their language is almost absurd. We have grown accustomed to Israeli officials attacking and dehumanizing Palestinian witnesses. But are we truly meant to accept that these Israeli military insiders and witnesses are blood-libeling … themselves?

The awkward yet clear reality for Israel and its defenders is that in under 90 minutes, 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officials have, knowingly or not, completely laid bare 36 months of baseless propaganda, weak arguments and repulsive falsehoods.

Do not accept my word for it. Accept theirs.

Mehdi Hasan is the CEO and editor-in-chief of Zeteo
NAZA, which is produced by the Guardian, is currently in cinemas and will be shown in more than 50 countries, including across the UK and the US. It will be available for free on the Guardian's website from late November