直面加沙战争的附带损害：专访纪录片《Naza》导演尤瓦尔·亚伯拉罕与雷切尔·索尔

Rachel Abrams: From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams and this is The Daily.

Awards Announcer: The special jury prize goes to Naza by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.

Rachel Abrams: Documentary Naza received widespread acclaim when it premiered last month at the Venice Film Festival. It won a top prize and it got a record-breaking standing ovation for 25 minutes. But reception for the film in Israel could not be more different. The two Israeli directors are being accused of damaging Israel's reputation in the world and of betraying their own country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he'd propose legislation that could revoke the filmmaker citizenship. All of this despite the fact that the film has not been released in Israel. Naza investigates the methods that the Israeli army used in Gaza in the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7th.

Israeli Soldier: Okay, they deserve it.

Rachel Abrams: From dark rooftops in Tel Aviv, the film features testimony from 24 anonymous military intelligence officers and soldiers. They discussed both the military policies that led to the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and their part in it. The Israeli military has pushed back on the film, saying that it misrepresents its efforts to avoid harming civilians. And so today, we speak to the directors of Naza, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor about their film and about how they're pushing for a reckoning in their home country. It's Monday, October 12th. Rachel Szor, Yuval Abraham, welcome to The Daily.

Rachel Szor: Thank you.

Yuval Abraham: Thank you.

Rachel Abrams: I think it's sort of fair to say that the two of you are experiencing some extremes. Your film Naza got a standing ovation. Actually, it was a record-breaking standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. And at the same time, the film, even though most Israelis have not seen it because it hasn't been released there, has inspired a lot of anger back in Israel. Rachel, for example, I understand that there have been protesters outside of your family's house. Yeah. So, I just want to ask you guys both just how you're feeling right now in the midst of of these extremes?

Rachel Szor: Yeah, it's been intense. The response has been very aggressive towards the film. You know, the demonstrations next to my parents house were calling to hang us like a lot a lot of violence towards us. Mhm.

Rachel Szor: But I think we also feel that it at least also create some sort of conversation about what we have done and doing in Gaza because for the last 3 years there hasn't been any conversation about this. And just to say that we made this film in Hebrew with Hebrew subtitles because we made this film first and foremost for an Israeli audience.

Yuval Abraham: Yeah, I agree. I mean that's what I try to hold on to as some kind of meaning in all of this that in as Rachel was saying in the conversations that have now been sparked as a result of the film. Mhm.

Yuval Abraham: And I think, you know, part of the reason why we we made this film is to try to make sense of the extremely large number of civilians that were killed by our country, by Israel in Gaza. But yeah, it's not an easy situation. I mean, we want to go back to Israel and it's a very aggressive response.

Rachel Szor: I mean, there's a total atmosphere of incitement. The death threats have been so many that people who love us like our parents, our friends, everyone is telling us don't don't come back. Like it's not it's not safe for you right now to go back.

Rachel Abrams: I want to talk about the film that has inspired all of this. Now the premise of the film, the way you actually made it is actually kind of simple. It's you, Yuval, on rooftops in Tel Aviv at night talking to 24 different Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers about the war in Gaza. Right.

Rachel Abrams: And the conversations, if I may, seem to be really about two things. On the one hand, they are about the casualties, the civilian casualties in Gaza and the tools that the IDF uses such as AI and mass surveillance. But the film is also very much about the title of this film which is NAZA. Can you just walk us through what NAZA means?

Yuval Abraham: Naza stands for Nzek Agavi. These are two words in Hebrew that can be translated as collateral damage in English or incidental damage. The way in which Israeli intelligence officers use this term is to indicate the number of civilians that they expect to be killed in an air strike in that specific air strike, in a particular air strike. It's like a euphemism. It's a substitute for saying human beings.

Yuval Abraham: Mhm. So if an air strike has an anticipated number of 15 civilian casualties, meaning 15, you know, women, men, children who are not the target of the strike, but the army knows it will likely kill them or harm them, then they use the word NAZA. They use NAZA to describe the amount of collateral damage. So they won't say 15 men, women, children. They say 15 Naza or 20 Naza.

Rachel Abrams: The word, as you mentioned, is euphemistic, and we're going to get into what points your film makes about that word. I I want to just talk first about the people in the movie. Can you just tell us a little bit more about who these 24 people are and the roles that they played?

Yuval Abraham: Of course. So, these are 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, all of whom were involved in either the mass surveillance or the remote killing of Palestinians in Gaza.

Rachel Szor: They have varying roles like different degrees of seniority and different roles within the army. Most of them belong to the so-called Israeli intelligence community. Just to be very clear, these are not folks who are mostly in Gaza. These are folks who are operating for the military from within Israel.

Rachel Abrams: Yes. And these are individuals who generally speaking come from upper middle upper class, relatively good education. Many of them are secular. They don't necessarily belong to the kind of families who would vote for Netanyahu or for Ben Gavir or for Smotrich. Ben Gavir and Smotrich of course are right-wing Israeli politicians just to say.

Rachel Szor: Yes absolutely so these are individuals who are part of Israel's liberal elites that is the kind of profile I would say of the people who are doing this remote surveillance and remote killing.

Rachel Szor: And a lot of these soldiers officers are considered leftist and you can connect it to Tel Aviv which is a city that is considered as the liberal capital of Israel and as you in the film actually in the heart of the city there's the main headquarters of the army so some of these operations are actually being operated from there.

Yuval Abraham: And Tel Aviv is only 40 miles away from Gaza but you can almost not tell that these things are happening from that city.

Rachel Abrams: I want to get to the revelations in the film so let's talk about what the film actually revealed what these conversations revealed to you about how the Israeli army targeted members of Hamas in Gaza after the October 7th attacks on Israelis by Hamas.

Yuval Abraham: Well, it's a film packed with revelations, but I think one is the the way in which the targeting systems that were used by Israeli intelligence to look for these Hamas members, specifically looked for them inside private houses.

Yuval Abraham: Mhm. And you know when you want to bomb so many targets, houses are a very convenient place because people come back home to sleep in their house. Mhm. [clears throat] One officer describes a system called Where is Daddy.

Rachel Szor: Which spied on the family members of these targets through mass surveillance technology and waited to get signals or alerts that they are coming back to their houses.

Rachel Abrams: Mhm.

Yuval Abraham: And it's important to note these are not houses where military activity had to be taking place. On the contrary, so it was much more difficult to find Hamas members when they were engaged in military activity or even when they were just walking around. But at home, they were static. So the system was wait until there was an alert that they were home and then bombed the house and kill them along with their family, their children, and also their neighbors. And this is why I believe so many of the casualties in Gaza were children and women. I mean, the the majority of them were killed inside residential buildings.

Rachel Abrams: The reason why I think this moment stood out to me, this particular revelation was because it sort of complicated the narrative that you often hear from Israel that Hamas uses human shields and operates out of civilian infrastructure like hospitals and schools. In this case, the army knows the civilians are there, knows that this is a private home, and proceeds anyway. And the other thing that I was really struck by was the level of detail that they have about the people inside these homes. They don't just know the target, but they have the names of their children, their ages, sometimes their photos, details about the layout of the home, and about their wives and the names of the people living next door. And you hear this in the film, where soldiers describe watching or listening to these families for days, weeks, months. They know what the bedroom looks like, they know what the living room looks like, they know who sleeps where. They listen to the intimate conversations of the target, but also of their family members and they can hear what's happening inside the house.

Rachel Szor: One of the soldiers described they would actually hear what's happening before and then also what's happening after they bomb. They would hear a conversation between a a couple, a baby crying.

Rachel Abrams: Were you surprised at that level of surveillance, at that level of sort of intimacy that the film claims to be happening?

Rachel Szor: Yeah, I think it was it was surprising because it kind of breaks this image that you have of how much the soldiers know before and after they bomb and the families.

Rachel Abrams: The film makes some claims about how the Israeli military uses AI. Yuval, you have been reporting on this for years and this film makes some really incendiary claims about the use of AI. And I wonder you all if you just want to explain that a little bit.

Yuval Abraham: Yes. So the way it worked according to sources that we've spoken with is that the army had a group of individuals that they believed were part of the Hamas military wing and then they had a machine learning algorithm that kind of learned the way in which they communicate, the way in which they behave. And it ran through the data of 2 million Gazans to look for other people that behave in a similar way and then mark them as suspected Hamas militants, junior militants. And according to sources we've spoken with, officers would approve the targets marked by the AI in about 20 seconds. Just looking at the target to make sure that it's a male, and then signing off on it, even though the people designing it and the military knew that it had an error rate.

Rachel Szor: But you know to to me the main issue here with AI is not the mistakes. Mhm.

Yuval Abraham: I think the main issue with AI is the scale that it enables. When you have AI that can just mark, you know, tens of thousands of so-called targets, junior targets, that's nobody in the army probably even remembers what their names are and instead of targeting maybe tens or hundreds of high-ranking operatives, suddenly the army has a list of thousands and tens of thousands of targets that it wants to bomb. And combined with a very permissive policy for collateral damage, where an officer can decide that for a junior target it is acceptable to kill 15 to 20 civilians, and for senior targets more than a hundred civilians, that's what creates mass civilian casualties. That's the reason why so many people were killed in Gaza. And to me, that is the heart of the revelation: how technology combined with permissive policy creates a factory of mass assassination. And everything that we included in the film has been verified and corroborated by multiple sources.

Rachel Abrams: I guess what I'm really getting at is if you did all this work to corroborate such an incendiary claim, if you had other people telling you the same thing, why not put an indication of that homework in the film? Because there are a lot of people that are going to be skeptical of these claims. They're going to say, well, this is just a bunch of anonymous people, how do we know this is real? And having that kind of evidence, that kind of corroboration in the film, could have helped make people more receptive to what you were trying to tell them.

Rachel Szor: Uh no I think that the film makes it case very very convincingly and the film has a kind of language as well. I mean there's no narration in the film. Mhm.

Yuval Abraham: I mean it's also a work of cinema and as a device we don't it doesn't use that you know uh disclaimer "we have four sources" disclaimer, which is a very journalistic device that I do use often when I write an investigative story uh in in written text, but also you know, the film shows the faces, the voices, the mannerisms of these people. But of course people can always pick and choose what to focus on. Sure, of course.

Rachel Szor: But but I think a good faith person who listens to the film should feel that it is bulletproof. And as I said before, the claims that are made in the film are claims that we we we have verified from from multiple sources.

Rachel Abrams: Yuval, did you go to the IDF with these claims before the film came out, before coming out with the movie?

Yuval Abraham: We went to the IDF over three years with um we've written, as I said, over a dozen articles um about about the Israeli military's firing policies about uh the way in which they use technology and surveillance technology and we we we went we approached them with detailed questions, pages of detailed questions before publication. And the IDF responded with general statements that they abide by international law, that they make efforts to avoid civilian harm, but they did not deny the existence of systems like Where is Daddy, nor did they deny the specific collateral damage authorizations that we reported on. They simply defended them as legitimate within their interpretation of the laws of war.

Rachel Abrams: Yeah, absolutely. Of course, it had a huge effect. It's a huge trauma for Israeli society. The massacre was horrific. There was a lot of anger. How did that collective trauma affect the mindset of the people you spoke with when they first entered the war?

Yuval Abraham: There are soldiers in the film saying how, you know, how they felt after the October 7th attacks and need to go to the army and need to do something. Of course, there is a context of trauma. I mean, there are people that I know that were killed and murdered on October 7th, people who had family members kidnapped. We all experienced that trauma. But what the film shows is how that trauma was mobilized into a policy of total destruction, where revenge and grief became the justification for abandoning all moral constraints.

Rachel Szor: And I don't think about anything that happens on the way. And there's a moment where he says, "But actually we we know that these children are there. We know that they are going to be killed. It is intentional." And there was a moment when when he just sort of realized that.

Yuval Abraham: He's an officer who who says he believes he took a part in a genocide, coming from the perspective of an intelligence officer that works inside this framework of targets and collateral damage. I think a lot of them said, well, look, we're not saying "we just followed orders." They recognized their own agency, and they were wrestling with the moral devastation of having been part of this machine.

Rachel Abrams: That is an extraordinary thing for an Israeli officer to say. And what about the visual contrast? You show these rooftop interviews, but you also show normal life in Tel Aviv. Can you talk about that choice to show everyday activity in the city?

Rachel Szor: Yeah. So, so basically what you see in the film in between the interviews is uh you look inside people's apartment, you see the life of Tel Aviv, inside the the apartments. And I think one of the things that we we decided to concentrate on and to show is the complete dissociation between everyday life in Tel Aviv and the horrific destruction happening just 40 miles away in Gaza. People are having dinners, walking on the beach, living normal lives, while in the very center of their city, military systems are directing the obliteration of families in Gaza. We wanted the audience to feel that chilling contrast.

Rachel Abrams: The killing in Gaza continued and continued for for two years up up until the ceasefire of October 2025. And to some degree it is still continuing to this day that there's been over a thousand Palestinians killed since that ceasefire. One person in the film even compares what happened to the Holocaust, which is an extraordinary thing for an Israeli to say. And I I I'm just sort of curious about your choice to include it.

Yuval Abraham: Yeah. He wasn't the only one, by the way, who says that they thought about they thought about the Second World War and they and they thought about the genocide of the Jewish people. And he described growing up, you know, in the Israeli education system and thinking about the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the perpetrators of crimes as as pure evil. And he could not understand how one would do it. And he says in the film, well, you know, I feel like I have I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but he says, I I have a better understanding now of the role of the perpetrator. And I think that, you know, this is not at all like it's not to make a simplistic comparison. I don't think there is any comparison between the Holocaust and what happened in Gaza. I I don't. But I do think that there is an importance there of thinking about again without making a simplistic comparison without saying that it's the same. It's not the same. But there are common patterns of dehumanization as the soldier was saying there are things that we can learn about being a perpetrator and understanding that better in order to prevent crimes from recurring in the future which I feel are important.

Rachel Abrams: The way I kind of looked at it was that we're in this moment right now where the world, a lot of the world has this incredibly negative view of Israel. Anti-semitism is on the rise. Many Israelis feel like they are in this existential battle for survival. I wonder how you feel about this larger criticism that this movie could be seized on by people who are interested in talking about things completely irrelevant to what the film is actually talking about. That it basically could feed anti-semitism is I think sort of the thing that's being unspoken here.

Yuval Abraham: I am terrified of anti-semitism. It is on the rise. You're absolutely right. There are horrible bad faith actors on the right, but also on the left. And I hear that and I'm not trying to dismiss that at all, Rachel. Really? But I think at the same time, I will say that I don't think that should stop us from being truthful and factual. So I think what are we saying here? That we cannot report about these facts because they you know it it may increase anti-semitism? There's a responsibility to be very clear to oppose anti-semitism completely. It's appalling, but that cannot seep into not being truthful and factual as a journalist. Just as by the way you mentioned October the 7th: Imagine someone saying, "Well, if if we report about the atrocities that Hamas has committed, and they have committed horrible atrocities, the massacre, the kidnapping of children, by reporting on that, by journalists doing their work and reporting on that, they would be making the Israeli response in Gaza much more lethal, much more vengeful." We just as journalists, we just need to be truthful to reality and we should take into consideration into account what you're saying. We shouldn't dismiss it, but I think that is our our role.

Rachel Abrams: You both at this point are very recognizable. You mentioned that you're not in Israel right now, but you hope to go back. Obviously, there are these very looming safety concerns, but I would imagine that like walking down the street, people can spot you. People can say things to you. If you're talking about wanting to go back at some point, what do you imagine your life to be like? Just even trying to resume, I don't know, anything resembling what your life looked like before this movie.

Yuval Abraham: Well, it's a good question. I've been thinking about it myself. The honest answer is that I don't know. I think we will go back eventually. And I hope that I can continue my work as a journalist and as a filmmaker. And if it means I can't walk as freely as I could before in certain areas of Israel that are more right-wing, then that's maybe a price that I will pay. I'm not the only one. I mean, people are constantly paying very heavy prices for the work that they are doing, much heavier than than this kind of price. So, I don't want to act the victim. I mean, we did something that we believe is important and we believe is true and and people should watch it and we know that sometimes these kinds of things can come with a certain price.

Rachel Szor: Israel is our home and like our work has been motivated and is motivated by a sense that we want to change, you know, we want to change the place. We want we want policies that we disagree with to change and we want the place to be better for Israelis and for Palestinians. And I want to see this place that I was born in to be a place not where there there is uh people dying every day and and horrible violence and stress and it's really it became the the holy lands, you know, Israel, Palestine. It it it can be a a better place. And I do think that there will be no future to anyone if we do not have an honest reckoning with the present and with the past.

Rachel Abrams: Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, thank you so much for spending so much time with us.

Rachel Szor: Thank you.

Yuval Abraham: Thank you. Thank you, Rachel.

Rachel Abrams: We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The capitals of Saudi Arabia and Yemen were both hit in a series of strikes on Sunday, a day after Saudi Arabia suffered its deadliest attack in over a decade. In that attack, the Houthis, the Iran-backed militant group, struck an international airport in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, killing at least 12 people and injuring more than 300. It was one of several fatal attacks by the Houthis on the airport this past week, shattering Saudi Arabia's sense of safety and remove from its war with neighboring Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been waging a bombing campaign against the Houthis that has killed 91 people since September 3rd, according to the Houthi-run Health Ministry in Yemen. And President Trump said on Friday that he had reached an agreement with Russia to immediately import Russian diesel fuel to the US market. An extraordinary development between the two countries after years of American sanctions on Russian energy exports during the war in Ukraine. The move is an attempt by the Trump administration to contain soaring energy prices due to the war with Iran, one of the biggest political liabilities for Republicans heading into next month's midterms. Energy experts, however, say the deal is not likely to have a major impact on the cost of diesel. Today's episode was produced by Ricky Netszki and Claire Tenniseter with help from Carlos Prio. It was edited by Maria Burn with help from Paige Cowat and Rob Zipco. Research help by Susan Lee. Contains music by Dan Powell and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Wonderly. Special thanks to Aaron Boxerman, David Halfinger, Yara Bayumi, and Isabelle Kersner.

Rachel Abrams: That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.