No Other Land directors on interviewing 24 Israeli soldiers in secrecy

Nick Vivarelli’s Variety interview with Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor was published on 10 September 2026, the day NAZA premiered in Venice competition. Variety describes 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers, all anonymous, their faces and voices digitally altered, who had been involved in the surveillance or remote killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. It defines NAZA as an acronym Israeli intelligence uses for collateral damage: the number of civilians expected to be killed in an airstrike. The film is the only documentary feature in that year’s competition, produced by The Guardian and James Wilson’s JW Films and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer. Wilson and Glazer are identified as the team behind The Zone of Interest. The photograph is credited to David Levene of The Guardian, and a still is credited to MK2.

Abraham says the film builds on his reporting and on work already published by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call. It took three years in secrecy, he says, on the assumption the Israeli state would try to stop it. He describes the subject as systemic, as on No Other Land, rather than one soldier’s mistake. Szor says the film touches the use of artificial intelligence to choose targets, massacres at food-distribution sites, and shootings of people returning to neighbourhoods they had been displaced from. The title, she says, comes from a practice the officers describe: targeting people in their homes, with their families, and calling the civilians killed with a target “NAZA.”

Asked if they can keep living in Israel, Abraham says their lives are there and that he sees no reason they should not go back, while hoping the state will not retaliate. Five days later Ice reported him telling Channel 13 he was afraid he could not return. He tells Variety he hopes the film makes the specifics harder to deny, and he cites two deaths that week: eight-year-old Wafaa Akila, killed with her father, and a first grader killed the same day in a school bombing. He says parties he would count as the Zionist left are not discussing the killing of more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Szor’s reason for the rooftops is that military headquarters are in Tel Aviv, about 60 kilometres from Gaza, and that the orders leave from computers in the city. Abraham cites Glazer on The Zone of Interest: victims out of sight, but never out of mind.

He says they will try to show the film in Israel, because Israeli society should reckon with what the military, the government and many people took part in. The citizenship threat is a later entry at https://nazafilm.org/record/timeline. Public screenings are at https://nazafilm.org/showings, and the watch page is https://nazafilm.org/watch.