Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's documentary "NAZA" won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on September 12. Abraham and Szor built the 80-minute film on three years of interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers about the military's targeting decisions in Gaza. The film keeps their identities hidden: it alters voices and faces and films interviews at night on Tel Aviv rooftops. At its September 10 premiere, the film got a 25-minute standing ovation, the longest in the festival's recorded history — before the Golden Lion for Best Film went to "Woman Unknown," directed by May el-Toukhy.

1. The Film Is a Political Smear (Naftali Bennett, Former Israeli Prime Minister + the IDF)

Bennett says the film invents its central charge, and it stings more coming from Israelis.

Bennett calls it a blood libel, full stop. The day after the premiere, the former prime minister said the film is "a horrific blood libel against our sons and daughters" and "this lie comes from Israeli filmmakers and is now being spread around the world." He said it isn't "courageous art" but "a cowardly blood libel."

His rebuttal is about what soldiers actually did. Bennett argued: "If Israel wanted to hurt the people of Gaza, we would not send our sons and daughters to fight house to house, through alleyways and tunnels, at the terrible cost of our own soldiers being killed and wounded."

The IDF backs him up on the facts. The military says strike decisions in Gaza are "done by human personnel only... not by artificial intelligence." It also says no one can verify the film's anonymous sources — including whether they served in the IDF at all — and that some of what they describe about national and military strategy is "clearly beyond the knowledge of junior-level soldiers."

2. This Is Journalism the Military Won't Own (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, Co-Directors)

They've done this before, and their own government's attacks aren't making them back down.

Abraham used his acceptance speech to answer his critics directly. Accepting the prize on stage, he said: "It's honestly not very easy to stand here, thinking of all the Israeli politicians and journalists who are now attacking this film and denying it without even seeing it."

The claim at the center of the film is specific. Abraham and Szor have written that NAZA documents a system where the military calculated anticipated civilian deaths in advance of strikes, rather than treating them as accidents. That's the difference they say the film proves with three years of on-record testimony from people who say they carried it out.

This isn't their first film on this territory. Abraham and Szor previously co-directed "No Other Land," which won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

3. This Is One of the Year's Most Important Films (Venice's Jury and Critics)

The festival didn't just screen it — it gave the film one of its top prizes.

Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal said the quiet part out loud. A reporter asked her at a press conference whether cinema should engage with wars in Gaza and Ukraine. She believes movies are "fundamentally, unavoidably political."

Critics went further than the ovation. The Hollywood Reporter called NAZA "a sober and indispensable doc highlighting the immoral, state-of-the-art killing machine employed by the IDF in Gaza." IndieWire called it "an essential documentary about the mechanics of genocide." The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave it four out of five stars.

The numbers back up the reception. As of September 11, the film held a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes across 14 reviews and a 96 on Metacritic — "universal acclaim."

Where This Lands

Bennett and the IDF say the film invents its central claim and nobody can verify its sources. Abraham and Szor say three years of testimony from inside Israel's own military is exactly the kind of evidence a "blood libel" charge can't survive. Venice's jury and critics didn't just watch the fight — they handed the film one of the festival's top prizes days after the longest ovation anyone can remember. The film that provoked the accusation now has an Oscar-winning pedigree and a festival record behind it.

Sources