Netanyahu targets NAZA filmmakers to hide algorithmic slaughter

By Nikhil Raghavan · Reporting from San Francisco · September 19, 2026

By attacking Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor for exposing automated targeting in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu and his rivals lock Israel into a cycle of denial.

The Outlawed Mirror

When a government drafts laws to strip citizenship from the people who hold up a mirror, the state is panicking at its own reflection. At the Venice Film Festival on September 12, the documentary NAZA—directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor—won the Special Jury Prize after a 25-minute standing ovation. Al Jazeera and vox.com reported that the film draws on interviews with two dozen Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers on Tel Aviv rooftops. They describe algorithmic targeting systems that flattened apartment blocks to kill a single person, alongside engineered starvation and civilian deaths.

Ministers did not order an inquiry or audit the targeting software. Instead, they struck back at the directors. Culture Minister Miki Zohar demanded the government strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship and send the Shin Bet to investigate them for treason. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu championed legislation to revoke citizenship from anyone accused of smearing soldiers, while proposing a twentyfold increase in defamation penalties. In Ashdod, Hebrew graffiti branded the pair traitors. Outside Szor’s family home, crowds chanted "execute traitors" and posted the family's address online with calls for revenge, Haaretz reported.

The Logic of the Purge

Channel 12, Israel's top network, gave just three percent of its war coverage to Gaza's humanitarian catastrophe during the first six months of fighting. Out of more than two hundred broadcast clips, only two showed Palestinian civilian casualties. The blackout worked: domestic polls showed most citizens believed the coverage was balanced. Because the public never saw the rubble, the documentary arrived as an intolerable shock.

The reaction follows the pattern of The Pentagon Papers, where an administration caught in military disaster targeted the whistleblowers rather than the architects of defeat. Washington ran the same playbook during the WikiLeaks Cablegate release in 2010, and again during the Edward Snowden leaks of 2013, answering revelations of mass surveillance with espionage charges.

In NAZA—named after nezek agavi, the military term for collateral damage—the directors exposed how the software actually behaves. Rather than acting as a precision scalpel, the automated targeter fed slaughter into a meat grinder, rubber-stamped by weary officers in seconds. With national elections set for October, admitting that reality threatens political survival. Facing state intimidation and a domestic press corps that joined the attack, the Committee to Protect Journalists stepped in alongside ten press freedom groups to demand protection for the filmmakers.

Can a Republic Survive Mandatory Denial?

Netanyahu's rivals echo his fury. Former military chief Gadi Eisenkot denounced the film for detachment from reality, while former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called it a blood libel against Israeli soldiers. Their argument reflects a society traumatized by October 7: in an existential war, anonymous insider testimony supplies hostile foreign audiences with propaganda and undermines frontline troops.

That defense misplaces the blame. Two filmmakers and two dozen soldiers on a roof did not damage the country's standing; an automated targeting apparatus that turned families into database coordinates did. Banning the camera will not rebuild the leveled neighborhoods. When opposition leaders and news anchors join the coalition to lynch the messengers, they lock the country into a cycle of denial that guarantees the next catastrophe.

Abraham and Szor now face exile while the Knesset prepares to pass its citizenship laws. The state may brand them traitors today, but history will remember them as the citizens who tried to pull the nation back from algorithmic slaughter.

Netanyahu targets NAZA filmmakers to hide algorithmic slaughter

The Outlawed Mirror

The Logic of the Purge

Can a Republic Survive Mandatory Denial?

Sources