Guardian review: intelligence officers cast a chilling light on civilian deaths

Peter Bradshaw’s review in The Guardian was published from Venice on 10 September 2026 and later updated, with a modification time of 16 October 2026. He defines the title the way the film’s subjects do: “Naza” as civilian collateral, the calculated number of projected civilian deaths from a strike. He thinks the term may take on the kind of afterlife the American military phrase “body count” had in Vietnam. He identifies the directors as Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the filmmakers behind No Other Land, a film about attacks by the Israel Defense Forces on Palestinian villages in the West Bank. He notes that NAZA is executive produced by Jonathan Glazer and James Wilson and produced under the auspices of The Guardian, the same paper in which, he writes, some of the stories had already appeared.

His reservation is anonymity. If nobody puts a name and a face to the words, he writes, the testimony lands with less force, even though the danger of being identified is obvious. He still says the film casts a chilling light. Faces in shadow and voices altered, the officers speak on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, with the camera drifting across apartments about 60 kilometres from Gaza. He reports that they reject the idea of “human shields.” As he summarises their account, a program analyses call patterns and the strike comes at night, in apartments already mapped. He notes a 15 percent permitted error rate, and another speaker’s expected “Naza” of 20, which he calls elastic.

He also describes speakers on the logistics of “cleansing” northern Gaza, sniper fire on civilians seeking food who cross an invisible line, and a unit unofficially loyal to Benjamin Netanyahu. One speaker reaches for a comparison with Nazism. Bradshaw rejects it. He writes that Gaza is not the Holocaust, and that Dresden is the comparison he finds more obvious. That is the reviewer’s judgment, not a finding of this desk. Vulture, the same day, reported an interviewee asking what his childhood lessons about the Nazis make him. The two pieces are two responses, not one claim.

The updated text at the end of Bradshaw’s review says NAZA is in cinemas in more than 50 countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, and that it will be free on the Guardian’s website from late November. No calendar day is named. That is the sentence behind https://nazafilm.org/watch. Public showtimes this desk lists are at https://nazafilm.org/showings. The prize, the ovation and the citizenship threat that followed this review are on https://nazafilm.org/record/timeline.