The Israeli government is promoting an online film project that mimics the style of NAZA, the award-winning documentary that details Israel’s massacres of civilians in Gaza, in an effort to contradict the findings of the actual film.
The real documentary, directed by Oscar-winning filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and produced by the Guardian, is in theaters and will be shown in more than 50 countries.
The Israeli government denounced the film and announced its intention to strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship, accusing them of treason.
In recent days, Israeli embassies have been promoting a link to a hastily produced online film called NAZA: The Real Story. Imitating some of the style of real documentary, including using anonymized interviews filmed on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film is hosted on a website called nazadocumentary.com.
Ariel Averbuch, an Israeli lawyer and army reservist who made the new documentary, described it as an “offensive move” intended to distract the world’s attention from allegations of the killing of civilians by the Israeli army. The film claims that Israel has “the most moral army in the world.”
Another filmmaker listed on the NAZA: The Real Story website is Roi Danino, a candidate for the right-wing Israel First party.
The website domain was registered on September 16, six days after NAZA premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize after receiving the longest standing ovation in the festival’s history.
Initially, the website falsely presented itself as a promotional page for NAZA itself, naming Abraham and Szor as directors and listing film festivals where the documentary was to be screened.
“Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated massacre of terrorists in Gaza,” it reads, distorting the film’s official synopsis by removing reference to the deaths of Palestinian civilians.
This wording was removed from recent website updates, once the NAZA: The Real Story video was added to the page.
It now appears to be a platform for the rival film, with a counter that implausibly suggests the short has been viewed more than 42 million times. (The film’s official YouTube page has only 30,000 views.)
According to technical analysis, the discrepancy suggests that the viewer count could have been determined by requests to the website, whether by humans or bots, rather than by the number of people who actually watched the video. Asked about the source of the 42 million claim, Averbuch said he did not know and referred questions to his technical team.
The Israeli army has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, in a military campaign that a United Nations commission has described as genocide.
The 24 interviews with members of the Israeli military in the original NAZA film detail how an AI-assisted mass surveillance device was activated during the Gaza War, revealing the systems that were used to target Hamas operatives, knowing that large numbers of Palestinian civilians would also die.
The Israeli Embassy in the United States, which shared the new documentary on its social media, said the Foreign Ministry was not involved in the film’s production and only intended to “amplify the message of its creators and expose a wider audience to arguments challenging and dismantling blood libel and false allegations.”
The Israeli government announced Thursday that it would present the filmmakers with a certificate of appreciation “for their contribution to Israeli public diplomacy,” saying the production had garnered tens of millions of views.
A spokesperson for the Guardian said: “We are aware that the Israeli government promoted a film hosted on a website which initially – and falsely – claimed to be the documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
“This was a brazen attempt to mislead the public and distract from the urgent issues raised by NAZA. »
In addition to its worldwide cinema releases, NAZA will be available for free on the Guardian website from the end of November.
Averbuch is the founder of an organization that claims to be waging an “advocacy war,” including publishing scripts to help influencers critique Abraham and Szor’s previous critically acclaimed film, No Other Land, which documented the destruction of the Palestinian village Masafer Yatta. No Other Land’s two Palestinian co-directors, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, have been harassed or detained by the Israeli military since the film won an Oscar in 2025.
Israeli government officials moved quickly to discredit NAZA’s content, while far-right activists threatened to hunt down the filmmakers.
Israeli army chief of staff Eyal Zamir said he would use “all tools at his disposal” against the film, while the army released a 10-page response to the film, based on interviews with more than 100 sources with knowledge of military systems used in the war.
Less than a week after NAZA’s premiere, the Israeli Ministry of Culture announced a formal investigation into the documentary, calling for Abraham and Szor to be stripped of their citizenship.
Protesters gathered outside the home of Szor’s parents, demanding that she receive the death penalty, and a mural depicting the filmmakers through the sight of a gun appeared in the Israeli city of Ashdod.
On Monday, far-right Israeli activist Mordechai David announced he was raising funds to build a team that would “pursue” Abraham. “We will find him,” David said in a video posted to Instagram.
Szor and Abraham addressed the backlash their documentary received during a question-and-answer session after its premiere in New York. “Our country does a lot to hide these systems,” Szor told the audience. “It’s not a world open even to the Israeli public. »
On Thursday at the London Film Festival, one of NAZA’s producers, James Wilson, said that the “hysterical, vituperative and aggressive reaction” from Israeli politicians against the documentary was not anticipated by the team behind it.
Wilson said that although Abraham and Szor had “anticipated the discontent…there was no anticipation of the level of aggression leading to these threats and the mob-stirring aspect.”
He added: “To have made a film, a documentary film, and to be threatened by the political elites in your home country, with accusations of treason and defamation… it has been very difficult, stressful, horrible and frightening for them.
“I’m trying to observe the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the film in the majority of countries around the world.”
Additional reports by Philip McMahon and Rachel Hall
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