Documentary of Anonymous Israeli Soldiers Wins Venice Prize While Palestinian Medical Footage Struggles for Air

A documentary built entirely from the voices of 24 anonymous Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, describing in their own words how they killed Palestinians in Gaza, won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival this year. Produced by The Guardian with Jonathan Glazer as executive producer, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the film, Naza, has since screened at festivals including Zurich and drawn reviews calling it essential and devastating.

The film's title is a Hebrew military acronym for anticipated civilian casualties, the number of non-combatant deaths a strike is permitted to cause before a target is approved. According to an account of the film published in Middle East Eye, the rules of engagement its subjects describe allowed for up to 20 such deaths per target. The soldiers and officers appear with their faces hidden, filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, describing strikes in procedural terms.

A trailer for the film circulating on YouTube presents this format directly: unidentified voices, obscured faces, calm recitations of targeting decisions rather than confession. Abraham and Szor previously co-directed the Oscar-winning No Other Land with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal.

The contrast, as laid out in the Middle East Eye piece, is with Palestinian-made and Palestinian-sourced documentation of the same war. Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, directed by Karim Shah and documenting the siege of hospitals and detention of medics, was commissioned by the BBC and then not broadcast by the corporation; Channel 4 aired it in July 2025. Life Support, a separate documentary built from phone footage shot by international doctors and by Palestinian cinematographers Mahmoud Abou Hamda and Suleiman Hejjy inside Gaza's hospitals, had its international premiere at Zurich the same week as Naza.

"We never needed them to confess, because the genocide has been recorded on camera, in full, from the beginning, filmed by the people living through it and by those who went in to treat them."

That line, from the Middle East Eye opinion piece co-authored by an observer affiliated with the advocacy group Health Workers 4 Palestine, frames the argument: Palestinian doctors, nurses and journalists documented the war in real time for three years, often at the cost of their lives, without receiving the institutional reception now given to anonymized Israeli testimony.

The piece's casualty figures, including a claim that more than 1,700 health workers have been killed in Gaza and an overall death toll above 74,000, are cited by the author but not independently sourced in the article itself; both figures are consistent with ranges reported by Gaza health authorities and the UN over the course of the war, though exact tolls are disputed and change with reporting periods.

The BBC's handling of Gaza: Doctors Under Attack has not been addressed in a public statement cited in the Middle East Eye piece. Occupation Watch has not independently verified the corporation's internal reasoning for declining to air the film before Channel 4 picked it up.