Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the investigation and prosecution of military personnel who gave testimony for the documentary “Naza“, which details the mass killing of civilians in Gaza through the accounts of 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers.
The order came through a statement from the Prime Minister’s office, which accused the participants of “serious crimes against information security, criminal defamation and harm to diplomatic interests.”
PM Netanyahu described the film as “a false, misleading and tendentious story that defames the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces internationally and seriously damages Israel’s reputation.” “We will always stand with our beloved and heroic fighters,” he added.
Yet even as he dismissed the details as defamation, Netanyahu acknowledged that the documentary “reveals top-secret information.” In a letter to the Army chief, the head of the Shin Bet and the Attorney General, he demanded that they “act urgently to discover the identity of all those who are involved or appear in the film.”
On September 14, Israeli military chief Eyal Zamir said the army had instructed its top legal official to examine options for legal action against those involved. Zamir claimed the film “adopts narratives of those who hate Israel, defames our soldiers and commanders and seeks to portray the IDF acting deliberately in an illegal manner.”
“Naza” recounts the killing of civilians in Gaza through testimony gathered from soldiers and intelligence officers. The interviewed service members described an environment of total contempt for international law, and said troops felt hatred toward Palestinians throughout the war.
Inside the Investigation
Much of the film draws on reporting since 2023 by Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who co-directed it, published in +972 Magazine and The Guardian, which also produced the documentary. In those reports, intelligence sources describe how Israel moved, after October 7, 2023, from authorizing the deaths of dozens to hundreds of civilians as “collateral damage” in strikes on senior Hamas Resistance Movement figures.
The title comes from an acronym used by Israeli intelligence to estimate how many civilians could die in a strike, such as “20 Naza.” The film also describes the bombing of homes with entire families inside once a suspected Hamas member returns to sleep, and the use of artificial intelligence models that predict, with a 15 percent error rate, the probability that a Gaza resident is a militant.
The crackdown follows accusations that Netanyahu is inciting violence against the film’s directors. On October 2, The Guardian defended the investigation, saying it consulted more than 100 sources over three years, including senior commanders involved in authorizing strikes, and cross-checked testimonies against leaked classified documents and specific operations.
Gaza’s official death toll exceeds 74,300. Medical journals and researchers say the destruction of Gaza’s health system has made counting extremely difficult and that the real number could be far higher. Nearly 1,500 Palestinians have reportedly been killed since the U.S.-backed ceasefire plan announced a year ago.
Human rights groups warn that the prosecution effort aims to silence testimony about violations of international law. For the soldiers who spoke, the order marks a turn from witness to target, while Palestinians in Gaza remain without protection and the occupation’s deadliest campaign continues without accountability.
Author: Laura V. Mor
Source: Agencies
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