The lights go down, and for a moment I forget I’m watching a screen. It fills with a rooftop in Tel Aviv at night, black and grey. The camera pans down. Through windows, we see people watching screens of their own — couples holding each other close, following the news, eating food. They appear completely absorbed in their own worlds, and why wouldn’t they be?
That’s the thing I can’t get past, watching them: This is what safety actually looks like. Just an evening uninterrupted, with no military aircraft flying overhead, no drones buzzing incessantly. Meanwhile, men and women on the rooftop above them calmly talk about how they decided how many of us would die on any given night.
These are the soldiers, mostly intelligence officers, who helped Israel carry out its destruction of Gaza, and whose testimonies form the basis of “NAZA.” The documentary takes its title from a term used inside the Israeli military — the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage” — referring to the number of people a strike is expected to kill.
“NAZA” does not show what that violence looked like: The dust, the screams, the panicked calls to find out who survived, the mothers searching through the rubble for their children, the names of missing loved ones being shared frantically in family WhatsApp groups, before the devastating news is confirmed. I lived through all of that in Gaza.
But as I watched the film, I realized that while we were still oblivious to the horrors ahead, there had been people watching, calculating, and making decisions that would define entire families’ futures.
That was what the film opened up for me, a part of the crime I had known about but could never fully grasp: The moment before the violence, when a human life is still being lived but has already been counted as an acceptable loss; when a person eating dinner, lying in bed, or talking to their wife or child becomes a number on a screen.
What surprised me wasn’t the massive scale of the killing, or even the coldness of it, but the proficiency. How practiced the soldiers in the film sounded as they described destroying other people’s lives, with the calm of someone discussing an errand they had carried out many times before.
One described the work simply as a “mission.” Another described it like a “video game.” One even said it was “really fun.” And then the sentiment I keep coming back to long after the film ended: These are not human beings, they are NAZA.
One soldier described knowing exactly what some of the people were doing in the moments before he killed them. He recalled hearing a man talking to his wife in bed. A baby crying. The sound of the TV. He listened to all of that, and then gave permission to drop the bomb.
Then, he explained, he would go out with friends in the evening, and come back in the next morning to do it again. For these Israeli soldiers, killing Palestinians was simply a task that could be paused and picked back up.
There was no hesitation in their voices, no sense that they were describing something that should be difficult to say aloud. They spoke with the ease of people who had learned how to do this, how to talk about it, and how to carry on afterward — as one of them put it, with “zero” consideration for the lives they annihilated.
A look into the machine
“NAZA” makes visible the planning, the language, the systems, and the decisions that precede the launching of a strike. But even this is only part of the story.
Some of the perpetrators were on the ground in Gaza, where the same violence became much more immediate as they moved through Palestinian neighborhoods, entering homes, setting them on fire, and enforcing “kill zones.”
Yet for every act described in the film, there are many others that were never recorded and will never be reckoned with — the constant surveillance, the restrictions on movement, the displacement of entire populations. “NAZA” opens a small window into the machinery of killing in Gaza, something much larger than any film can capture.
One soldier described his work as “systematic,” and he meant it as reassurance, proof of professionalism. But my memory kept insisting on recalling the people victimized by these systems.
Throughout the screening, I could not stop myself from putting names back into the places where the film placed numbers. Every calculation brought back a face. Every reference to victims brought back a street. Every description of a military operation made me think of the people who would eventually have to live with its consequences.
When one soldier described how Israeli forces massacred Palestinians at aid distribution sites, I thought of my cousin, 35-year-old Raed Majed Mushtaha, killed in the “Flour Massacre” in early 2024 as he searched for food to bring back for his family. I remembered my friend Youssef Maher Dawas, killed in the first week of the genocide, whose body was later found beneath the rubble.
Other soldiers described how the army routinely authorized the killing of 20 civilians in pursuit of a single junior target, and as many as 500 in pursuit of a senior target. These targets, however, had predominantly been “incriminated” by an AI system that, the soldiers admit, was known to err in around 15 percent of cases — yet they killed them anyway, along with their whole families.
I felt stuck on that sentence. I thought about my uncle, Hisham Zafer Mushtaha, his wife, Hanan, their sons, Basel, and Mohammed, and their four grandchildren, Raged, Hisham, Lana, and Abdrahman, aged between 3 and 12 years old. I imagined them being killed because an AI algorithm assumed there might be a target there.
For the soldiers, these moments are merely part of a daily “mission,” obscured by a machine into a sequence of commands on a screen that ends with a coffee break. For them, Raed, Youssef, Hisham, Hanan, Basel, Mohammed, Raged, Hisham, Lana, and Abdrahman are all NAZA. For me, they are people I knew and loved, whose calls I waited for, whose absence will forever be part of our lives.
That is what I kept resisting throughout the film: the ease with which a person can disappear into the language of an operation and become mere data. Once you have experienced someone as a human being, it becomes almost impossible to accept them as anything less.
For so long, I had asked how these people I knew were killed. Watching the film, my mind kept returning to the opposite question: How did I survive? I had spent so much of my life in Gaza thinking that, because I did not belong to any faction, I would be safe. I believed that if Israel was justifying its killings to the world by portraying those it killed as military targets, then I would make it out alive, because I was not one of them.
But the difference between me and the people I’ve lost may have been nothing more than what an AI algorithm flagged, and what someone decided, through a screen in Tel Aviv, would be an acceptable amount of NAZA. I realized, perhaps for the first time, that there was no precaution that I could have taken that would have guaranteed my survival. The fact that I did survive was completely random, and entirely out of my control. And when I think about that, my heart sinks.
More than a number
What I want, watching this, is not catharsis. I have had enough of that. Just as I insist on attaching names to the people the soldiers were calculating to kill, I want to attach names to the soldiers themselves — the ones who said it was “fun” to destroy Gaza, who viewed Palestinians in Gaza as mere data points. This is the only way that the “systematic” nature of Israel’s killing machine stops functioning as a shield, one that allows those responsible to feel like they were mere cogs.
When I finally left the screening, I understood what had made it so painful. I had gone in expecting to watch a film about Gaza. I came out thinking about how little of Gaza can ever be contained inside a film, an article, a photograph, a number. We had been telling the world what it felt like to live beneath that sky, what the darkness sounded like, and that behind every number was a father, mother, grandparent, sibling, or friend.
I did not feel that the film had finally given me a voice — I knew I already had one. What it gave me was the strange, exhausting experience of hearing an echo of things we had been saying for years, and discovering how differently the same truth sounds when it travels through a different mouth.
When the film ended, I called my family in Gaza, as I do every night. I have called them often to tell them where to move, which road to avoid, thinking I was able to keep them safe. But now, talking to them, I kept thinking about surveillance and systems that can follow their movements and turn them into a target.
But sitting there after the film, a new thought took over: What if the people watching them know more about where they are than I do? What if they can see what I cannot? My family might be sitting together, drinking tea, arguing about something small, laughing at something one of my brothers said — a few ordinary minutes that still belonged to them — while somewhere far away, those same minutes could already be data on a screen.
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And as I spoke to them that night, for a moment I forgot everything I had seen in the film. I did not hear coordinates, or surveillance, or AI. I heard my family. A familiar voice. A breath. Someone asking me how I was. And I understood, in that moment, what these systems can never account for: that each person on the screen is an entire world.
