The Israeli directors presented their documentary in the United States for the first time, featuring testimonies from soldiers and officers about the war in Gaza, in a conversation with Dennis Lim at the New York Film Festival.

The New York Film Festival hosted the U.S. premiere of NAZA, the documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (co-directors of No Other Land) that brings together testimonies from 24 Israeli soldiers and officers about how attacks are carried out in Gaza. Following the screening, the filmmakers spoke with Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, who noted that the film arrived amid intense controversy dating back to its premiere in Venice, fueled “mostly by people who haven’t seen it.” Abraham, an investigative journalist for +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian, who also produces the film, explained that the documentary draws on more than eleven published investigations and more than one hundred confidential sources. “Some felt the need to speak, especially in Hebrew, to break through the walls of denial, justification and silence in Israeli society,” he said of the interviewees. He also acknowledged that all of this had been documented “first and foremost by Palestinian journalists on the ground for many, many years.” “You don’t need to hear from Israeli soldiers to understand the horror of what is happening in Gaza. But it persists because many people still deny it, and part of our hope is that this film makes that denial a little more difficult.”

Addressing criticism over the anonymity of the testimonies, Abraham recalled that one of the interviewees says in the film that Israel could retaliate if he were to show his face. “In the history of investigative journalism, guaranteeing the confidentiality of sources is often a way of seeking the truth. This film could not have been made any other way,” he said. He stressed that revelations such as the number of civilians the army allows to be killed in an attack, or the existence of the Lavender system, were corroborated by other media outlets, and that all identities were verified together with The Guardian’s investigations desk. Szor, the film’s cinematographer, explained why they chose to film the interviews on rooftops with Tel Aviv in the background: “When you walk around Tel Aviv, you have the feeling that all these crimes are happening, that we are the ones committing them, and that nobody talks about it.” She recalled that many of these officers consider themselves left-wing, live in the city and operate from the headquarters located at its center. “You see the pictures of the hostages everywhere. But nobody talks about what is happening in Gaza.” Regarding the drawings made by the interviewees, she said they helped show that systems Israel conceals even from its own public “are something real.”

Abraham said he chose to ask about the “how” rather than the “why,” without narration or infographics, because he anticipated a very harsh reaction. “I think Netanyahu compared this film yesterday to a barrage of ballistic missiles. And you know what happens to people who fire missiles: they get killed. It’s the criminalization of journalism,” he said. At the end of the conversation, when Lim mentioned the nearly $4 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel, Abraham recalled that what is described in the film “was done with the money of the taxpayers of the people sitting here.” Referring to trucks protesting outside the festival with images of October 7, he said that the massacre “is completely unjustifiable, but it cannot justify the killing of so many civilians in Gaza either.” He concluded: “I don’t want to live in a world where legitimate empathy for Israeli victims is weaponized by leaders like Netanyahu to mean a lack of empathy for Palestinians. We should all refuse to play this zero-sum game.”

[Full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-b4DxbhQmY]