Cinema

Israel Makes Its Own NAZA but Keeps Gaza Shut to Journalists

As NAZA fills cinemas, Israel's embassies promote a rival film with the same name, made with the army's help. Gaza stays closed to the reporters who could test both.

Husam Sam Asi 5 October 2026, 12:27 · Updated 11 October 2026, 13:53

AI-generated editorial illustration / UKScreen

Three weeks after NAZA won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, Israel has an answer, and the answer carries the same name. NAZA: The Real Story runs for 49 minutes, streams free in 17 languages on its own website and has been promoted in recent days by Israel’s embassies in Washington and London. “A new Israeli documentary is setting the record straight,” the Washington embassy wrote on X.

Journalists in press vests sit outside a media building in Gaza in December 2008. — Archive photo: Al Jazeera’s Gaza crew and other journalists outside their media building, 28 December 2008. Photo: Al Jazeera English / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The film’s website names its makers: Roi Danino, a reserve lieutenant colonel; Ariel Averbuch, a reserve major and lawyer; and Hagay Gutman, a television editor. They used declassified army recordings and combat footage and put serving officers on camera. “This is an offensive film, not a defensive one,” they said. It was made with the cooperation of senior army commanders.

Two films, one missing witness

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor built NAZA on the testimony of 24 Israeli military and intelligence sources whose identities are concealed. The army’s objection, reported by Israel365 News, is that the film “cites no directives, records or documents”, which leaves its claims, the army says, “impossible to check”.

Both films ask for trust. One asks the audience to believe soldiers who conceal their names while the army investigates the leak. The other asks it to believe officers speaking with their commanders’ cooperation, over footage the army chose to declassify. The evidence that could decide between them lies in Gaza, and Israel controls who may go there to look.

The gate that stays shut

Since 7 October 2023 Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza independently, admitting them only on escorted military visits. A petition by the Foreign Press Association has sat before Israel’s Supreme Court since 2024. In April the editors of more than two dozen news organisations, among them the BBC, Reuters and the Associated Press, said in an open letter: “For more than 930 days, Israel has barred foreign reporters from independently entering the territory.” The state’s lawyer told the court that “the entry of journalists still poses a security risk, both to the journalists themselves and to military forces”. In September the UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, urged Israel to give international investigators unrestricted access.

The witnesses already inside

That leaves Palestinian journalists as the only independent witnesses, and they are the ones being killed. The Committee to Protect Journalists counts about 200 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza and says Israel has killed more journalists than any government on its records. On 1 October the army published an online database naming 170 of them as operatives of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other armed groups, saying it rested on “verified evidence, including visual material and documents produced by the terror organizations”.

Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, went through every entry and reported that 59 offer nothing beyond the words “based on multiple intelligence sources”. In the case of the photojournalist Hassan Aslih, the Hamas document cited to show he was a “military operative” lists him as a photographer in media services, according to Common Dreams. An earlier Israeli study, by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, counted “employment in a media outlet belonging to one of the terror groups” as affiliation. On that definition, a cameraman at a Hamas-run channel is counted as tied to a terror group.

Independent scrutiny cuts both ways: the Committee to Protect Journalists has removed about 20 names from its own list after reviewing the evidence.

Critics at home get the same treatment

Israel’s own citizens fare little better. When Abraham called for a ceasefire from the stage of the Berlin Film Festival in 2024, German politicians called his speech antisemitic and he received death threats. “To stand on German soil as the son of Holocaust survivors and call for a ceasefire – and to then be labelled as antisemitic is not only outrageous, it is also literally putting Jewish lives in danger,” he told the Guardian. Last month the culture minister, Miki Zohar, accused him and Szor of “treason against the state”, one of the threats Israeli ministers have made against the two directors.

Israel once tolerated harder questions. In 2013 Dror Moreh told UKScreen how every surviving head of the Shin Bet security service sat before his camera for The Gatekeepers and questioned what their own methods had achieved, and the film sold out Israeli cinemas. Thirteen years later the soldiers who speak hide their names, and their government promotes a film to contradict them.

Israel cannot claim the truth while it controls every route to it. A state confident of its record would open Gaza to foreign reporters and UN investigators and let them test each claim in both films. Israel has kept the territory closed, labelled 170 of the journalists it killed as terrorists and called its own film-makers traitors, while critics, Jewish ones included, are branded antisemites. Now its embassies are promoting a film in which its officers vouch for themselves. That is propaganda. The record Israel says it wants set straight can be set straight by independent witnesses, on the day it lets them in.

Sources: Jerusalem Post; Middle East Eye; Embassy of Israel to the USA (X); NAZA: The Real Story (official site); Israel365 News; Times of Israel; Common Dreams; Asia Pacific Report; Ynet; Committee to Protect Journalists; Al Jazeera (CPJ record); Columbia Journalism Review; +972 Magazine; Courthouse News; Al Jazeera (editors’ letter); The Defense Post; WION; Al Jazeera (Zohar).