Abraham and Szor on bearing witness to targeted killing in Gaza

The World Screen’s interview with Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor was published on 10 September 2026, the day NAZA premiered in Venice competition. It calls NAZA a slang term the Israeli military uses for collateral damage, and it credits the sale to mk2 Films, the production to The Guardian and to Jim Wilson through JW Films, and the executive production to Jonathan Glazer. The setup matches the other premiere reports: 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, interviewed on rooftops in nighttime Tel Aviv. Abraham says the sources were confidential, slow to agree, and not of one mind. Some, he says, spoke from shame and wanted what they had done to be public. Others spoke with a kind of pride about knowledge from a sensitive unit. The film, the piece says, does not dwell on those motives. It stays on the killings.

Szor says she cannot predict the reception at home, and that showing the film in Israel matters. Newspaper allegations, she says, were denied by an IDF spokesman. Hebrew, on camera, in Tel Aviv, may be harder to ignore. Abraham says bombing family homes is a feature, not a mistake: homes were mapped before 7 October, systems wait until a target goes inside, and the strike then kills the family, often three generations, and neighbours. Szor, born in 1994 according to the piece, describes people her age using “NAZA” for women and children. Her example: 40,000 targets, each with permission for at least 20 “NAZA,” would destroy the place.

World Screen says the film treats a 15 percent error rate as acceptable, and that the wrong house is sometimes hit. Abraham’s reply is that the error rate is not the issue. The issue, he says, is calculated killing of civilians, with full knowledge. He says the allegations were checked multiple times, and that the killing has not stopped. His example is a seven-year-old girl found bombed with her father in a car. He says there is no ceasefire, and that since October 2025 Israel has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians, 300 of them children. Those figures are his, as this interview quotes them. Variety the same day quoted him on a different child, eight-year-old Wafaa Akila. This desk does not merge the two reports into one victim.

He says a line of Glazer’s about The Zone of Interest — victims out of sight but never out of mind — shaped the interviews. After Venice, World Screen says, the film would screen in San Sebastián and at the New York Film Festival. Those listings belong on https://nazafilm.org/showings. The political aftermath is at https://nazafilm.org/record/timeline. Where to watch is at https://nazafilm.org/watch.