LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Israel's military approved high numbers of civilian deaths for each suspected Hamas member it targeted in Gaza. That's the claim in a new documentary from two Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers, and it features the testimonies of 24 anonymous Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers. They describe a remote targeting system that includes the use of artificial intelligence, a system they say is responsible for the mass killings of Palestinian civilians. The film is called "NAZA."
YUVAL ABRAHAM: NAZA is a military acronym.
FADEL: That's Yuval Abraham, an Israeli investigative journalist and one of the filmmakers.
ABRAHAM: It stands for two Hebrew words, nezek agavi in Hebrew, which could loosely be translated to collateral damage. It's the words that Israeli intelligence officers use when describing the number of civilians that they know or they expect are going to be killed in an airstrike. So just to give you an example, one soldier says in the film, in the army, we don't say 15 women and children are going to die in this strike. We say 15 NAZA.
FADEL: And this is Abraham's fellow filmmaker Rachel Szor.
RACHEL SZOR: Palestinian journalists have been reporting this for the last years, and many people in the world know, but it's probably the first time that people from inside the system are talking and describing the systems that they've used.
FADEL: Only a few audiences have actually seen the film at festivals. Today is its U.S. release. And it's not yet available in Israel, but that has not stopped the backlash and threats. Right-wingers are calling for the filmmakers' execution. The government is threatening legal action.
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PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: (Non-English language spoken).
FADEL: That's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposing legislation that would revoke the citizenship of anyone the government deems defamed the Israeli military. I spoke with Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor in New York.
ABRAHAM: When you hear your own prime minister saying things like that your film is like a range of ballistic missiles fired at the country, like, it's clear what he's trying to say. I mean, people who shoot missiles at a country are people that Israel will kill, you know? So it's really unhinged in a way, and it's important to say that it will not deter us. The film is coming out, even if Netanyahu is unhappy about it.
FADEL: You break the film into kind of different chapters.
ABRAHAM: Yeah.
FADEL: Right? And one of the chapters is called "Where's Daddy?" What is that?
ABRAHAM: Where Is Daddy is an algorithm that is based on scanning tens of thousands of phone conversations, text messages that are being sent of family members of tens of thousands of people that Israeli military wants to kill in Gaza. And it looks for words indicating that, for example, the daughter or the son of the person that Israeli military wants to kill is communicating that their father is going to be coming back home. And then once that happens, the Israeli intelligence officer gets an alert that, oh, here's a potential assassination strike.
One person says, Gaza became like a factory of targets. And when you're making a factory of targets, then the basic unit is, another officer says, is the home. It's the family home. There's a moment in the film where I talk to one of the officers, and he explains how they would be able to kill up to 20 civilians per target, and there are tens of thousands of targets. I tell him, but, you know, if you can kill up to 20, and there are tens of thousands of them, the result is - and he says, oh, it's all of Gaza. Yeah. And he says that that's why he stopped at some point, and he couldn't continue to do it.
FADEL: Why did they agree to talk at such a risk to themselves?
ABRAHAM: For many of them, it related to this feeling that it was important to speak. I mean, there's one soldier who says he believes he participated in a genocide. And for this type of more whistleblower, kind of, it was clear that they have an ideological motivation, feeling that, you know, they took part personally in some very grave crimes, and they wanted other people, especially Israelis, but also around the world, to know about them. I also want to say there are thousands and thousands of soldiers and officers in Israel right now that will watch this film, and they will know - despite the government's denials, they will know that it's true 'cause they saw it themselves.
FADEL: There are criticisms that you've been facing. You didn't give the Israeli military a chance to respond to what these 24 people said. If you could respond to that criticism.
ABRAHAM: Absolutely. So these claims are not new for the Israeli military. As I said, we've since October 7 - I mean, investigation after investigation, we've made those claims, and we've given the Israeli military an opportunity to respond to those claims. And those responses are in those stories. In the film, the way we reflect the Israeli military's position is through TV footage. I mean, Netanyahu is in the film. He's on Israeli TV, and he is essentially saying what the Israeli military have told us.
FADEL: Which is?
ABRAHAM: That the Israeli army does not target civilians, that Hamas is using civilians as human shields. It is a response to the massacre of October 7, which, by the way, is in the film. I mean, we've lost people that we know and love in that massacre, and we just don't think that it justifies the slaughter of so many civilians in Gaza, the destruction of the place.
FADEL: For both of you, walking away from this film, is there any one story that you heard from these testimonials that really stays with you?
ABRAHAM: I've been recently thinking about one of the soldiers in the film who spoke about the policy of burning homes. He said how every house they would enter to in Gaza, they would burn it. And they would see family picture albums, notebooks, you know, belongings of people. And he said, we were erasing history. Sure, the bombardment campaign, the killing would erase the entire families, but we were there to erase the existence of the place.
SZOR: To me, one of the things that was really also - it was new to me - was the use of the phone, the fact that they can actually open the microphone and they do that and hear what is happening inside the apartment before they bomb and after they bomb. And they know how many people are going to be in the apartment. They can hear. They - as you said, they sometimes open the phone of the target or of the family and see pictures of them. And to me, it was something that really stayed with me, how much you know about the person and the family that you're going to bomb.
FADEL: Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Their documentary is called "NAZA." Thank you both so much.
ABRAHAM: Thank you very much.
SZOR: Thank you.
FADEL: The Israeli military is rejecting the claims made in the film, saying it does everything possible to mitigate civilian harm. A spokesman for the prime minister's office told NPR they're not trying to silence the filmmakers, calling Israel a free country. He added that no one in the government has seen the film, even though they asked the filmmakers for access. Abraham and Szor say they're making "NAZA" available to watch for free online beginning in November. They want people in Israel and the U.S. to see it for themselves. While they hope to go home soon, for now, they're too scared to return to Israel.
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