There is a strange thing about watching NAZA: very little of what makes the film horrifying requires an image of Gaza.
The camera stays mostly in Tel Aviv. Israeli filmmakers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham sit with 24 anonymous soldiers and intelligence officers on dark rooftops and ask them to explain how the machinery worked. They talk about targets, surveillance, artificial intelligence, homes selected for strikes and the number of civilians expected to die with them. “NAZA,” according to the film, is military shorthand for that expected toll.
One source describes approval being granted for a strike in which as many as 500 civilians could be killed alongside a single target.
Read that again. Not 500 dead discovered afterward. According to the testimony presented in the film, five hundred cleared in advance as an acceptable civilian toll, and then the strike goes ahead.
The Israeli military categorically rejects the documentary’s characterization, argues that its anonymous sources cannot be independently verified and says it makes extensive efforts to minimize civilian harm.
But the most revealing fact about NAZA may be this one: much of its underlying story was not actually new.
The Associated Press noted after the film’s Venice premiere that the documentary builds on years of reporting by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian. Investigations had already examined Israel’s use of artificial intelligence in targeting. Palestinian journalists had spent years documenting families killed inside homes, neighborhoods reduced to rubble and strikes whose civilian toll was difficult to reconcile with the language of surgical warfare.
So why does NAZA land with such force?
Because this time the people speaking are not standing beneath the rubble. They are describing the screen on which the target appeared.
That distinction should make American journalism uncomfortable, though it takes some care to say why, because there is a perfectly respectable version of the objection that answers itself.
Insiders really are more probative about certain things. A man standing in the wreckage of his house can testify to what happened to it. He cannot testify to what appeared on the screen, who authorized the strike, or what number was cleared before it. Testimony from inside the apparatus is not merely better credentialed. It is evidence about a different question, and journalism was right to treat it as significant.
That concession is what makes the rest of this an indictment rather than a complaint.
The problem was never that American outlets distinguished between witnesses to outcomes and witnesses to process. It was that they ran two different standards of proof at once. Palestinian accounts of what happened were verified, attributed, hedged and footnoted with a reminder about which ministry had counted the bodies. Israeli accounts of what was intended, this building was a military target, this strike was precise, this operation was proportionate, frequently arrived as background.
One was a claim to be tested. The other was the room the testing happened in.
Official language does not need to be fabricated to shape a story. It only has to establish its premises before anyone interrogates them. If a military calls a building a “military target,” the first journalistic question cannot simply be how many people died when that target was struck. It also has to be who designated it, using what intelligence, under what civilian casualty threshold, and with what evidence available for independent scrutiny.
Those questions were asked. Sometimes rigorously, often at real professional cost, occasionally by reporters who paid for it with their access. They were rarely asked with the reflex of doubt that greeted every number coming out of Gaza.
You can see the difference in two Washington Post headlines published just two days apart.
On August 8, 2024, the paper led with: “Israel strikes Gaza schools, saying Hamas uses them to plan attacks.” The Israeli military’s explanation of why the schools were legitimate targets was built directly into the headline. Washington Post, August 8, 2024
On August 10, after another Israeli strike hit a school sheltering displaced Palestinians and Gaza civil defense authorities reported nearly 100 people killed, the headline read: “Nearly 100 killed in Israeli strike on school, Gaza officials say.” The death toll was presented as an attributed Palestinian claim. Israel’s allegation that Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants had been operating from the school appeared separately. Washington Post, August 10, 2024
Two headlines cannot establish the behavior of an entire press corps, but they do they capture the overall mechanism. Israeli assertions about a target’s military character could enter the frame as the explanation for an attack. Palestinian information about the people killed by one remained something “officials say.”
Research now gives the broader concern empirical weight. A 2026 study published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly examined coverage in The New York Times and The Washington Post from 2023 through 2025. It found that Israeli victims were more frequently humanized, that coverage relied heavily on Israeli sources and that Israeli violence was often placed within a self-defense frame. Read the study in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
Some American outlets produced extraordinary reporting from Gaza under punishing conditions. The point is narrower and more serious: the structure of authority was uneven.
An Israeli military spokesperson arrived in a story with the institutional weight of an official source. A Palestinian standing in front of what remained of his home frequently arrived as a witness to tragedy.
One explained what happened. The other was someone it happened to.
NAZA scrambles that hierarchy. Suddenly the allegation is coming from inside the institution. The terminology is being decoded by people who say they used it. The civilian casualty figure is no longer merely something reported after an explosion; according to the film’s witnesses, it could be something considered beforehand.
Palestinians had been describing the result for years.
What changed was the narrator.
Washington ran the same arrangement
The Democratic Party’s failure on Gaza was not that its leaders chose their words too confidently.
It was that, for more than a year, the Biden administration could describe Palestinian suffering as unbearable while continuing to supply the military campaign producing it. It could warn Israel about civilian deaths, acknowledge catastrophic conditions, and even conclude that U.S. weapons may have been used inconsistently with international humanitarian law, then continue military assistance anyway.
This was a material policy, not simply a messaging problem.
In March 2024, as the death toll in Gaza mounted and the administration publicly warned Netanyahu against an assault on Rafah, The Washington Post reported that the Biden administration had quietly authorized billions of dollars in additional bombs and fighter jets for Israel. The package included more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, weapons the paper noted had already been associated with mass-casualty events in Gaza. Washington Post report on the March 2024 weapons authorizations
The administration eventually paused one shipment of heavy bombs over concerns about their use in densely populated Rafah. Other weapons continued to flow.
Meanwhile, the administration kept returning to the same basic account of the war that Israel itself used to defend its campaign: October 7 had forced Israel into war; Israel had the right to defend itself; Hamas operated among civilians and used them as human shields; Palestinian civilian deaths were tragic, but Hamas bore enormous responsibility for placing those civilians in danger.
The Democratic party adopted the same political shield and language as though it settles everything that follows from it.
Biden established the frame almost immediately. In October 2023, he said Hamas used Palestinian families as human shields and declared that Israel had both a right and a duty to respond. Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeated the human-shields argument while defending Israel’s right to military action. Months later, State Department officials were still pairing criticism of Israeli conduct with reminders of Israel’s right to respond to October 7.
Then, in May 2024, Biden went further. Asked about the genocide accusation, he stated: “What’s happening in Gaza is not genocide. We reject that.”
The administration was not standing outside the war neutrally evaluating a legal claim. It was the principal military backer of the government being accused.
And the evidence did not stop accumulating after Biden dismissed the charge.
In December 2024, Amnesty International concluded after a major investigation that Israel had committed and was continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Its report examined killings, serious bodily and mental harm, destruction of infrastructure, forced displacement, restrictions on aid and the conditions of life imposed on Gaza, alongside statements from Israeli decision-makers. Amnesty International’s genocide report
In September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry reached its own conclusion. It found reasonable grounds that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the Genocide Convention and concluded that the required specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, in whole or in part, was present. Israel has categorically rejected these findings. Neither the Amnesty report nor the U.N. commission’s finding is equivalent to a final merits judgment by the International Court of Justice. U.N. Commission of Inquiry genocide findings
But by then, the political contradiction was impossible to reduce to a disagreement over terminology.
The United States had continued supplying the weapons. Its president had rejected the genocide charge. Its officials had repeatedly relied on the same self-defense framework used by Israel to justify the campaign. And whenever the scale of Gaza’s destruction threatened to overwhelm that framing, October 7 returned to the front of the sentence.
Kamala Harris carried that structure into her presidential campaign.
At the Democratic National Convention, her discussion of Gaza began by pledging: “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself.” She then returned to the horrors of October 7, including the massacre at the music festival and allegations of sexual violence, before turning to Palestinians: the deaths, the hunger, the repeated displacement, the “heartbreaking” scale of suffering. Harris’s 2024 DNC speech
There is something profoundly inadequate about treating October 7 as though it answers the legal and moral questions raised by everything that came after it.
The Democratic rhetoric repeatedly returned to that original day as the moral starting point of the war, even after months of mass civilian death, the destruction of neighborhoods and essential infrastructure, repeated displacement, severe restrictions on humanitarian aid and mounting allegations of international crimes.
That mattered because the administration was not merely commenting on events.
It was supplying the weapons.
Harris spoke more explicitly than Biden about Palestinian suffering. She called conditions in Gaza catastrophic, supported a ceasefire and affirmed Palestinian self-determination. But when voters demanded a material break from Biden’s policy, her campaign did not embrace an arms embargo. At the convention, she again paired Palestinian suffering with an unequivocal commitment to maintaining Israel’s military capacity. Reuters described the speech as failing to resolve one of the Democratic Party’s deepest internal rifts over Gaza.
Then came the Democratic National Convention itself.
The Uncommitted movement had mobilized more than 750,000 primary voters against the administration’s Gaza policy. Its delegates asked for a Palestinian American to speak from the convention stage. The request was denied. Israeli-American hostage families were given a platform. A Palestinian American voice addressing what Palestinians had endured in Gaza was not.
The symbolism was difficult to miss, and the mechanism was identical to the one in the newsroom.
Palestinian suffering could be acknowledged and mourned. Democrats could say that they too suffer and mourn with us.
But Palestinians were not allowed the same authority to define what was happening to them, and their testimony was not permitted to change the central policy keeping U.S. weapons flowing.
So while suffering was finally acknowledged with empty words, letting any of it rearrange policy was something else entirely.
The party paid for the distance
A nationwide Arab American Institute poll conducted before the election found that 81 percent of Arab American voters considered Gaza important to their vote. Twenty-six percent ranked it among their most important issues, placing it second overall behind jobs and the economy. Among Arab American Democrats, Gaza ranked first. Harris was polling 18 points below Biden’s 2020 support among Arab American voters. Arab American Institute 2024 polling
This is a whole constituency telling a political party, before an election, exactly what is driving its rupture with that party.
Muslim voters showed the same break. Reuters reported in September 2024 that anger over U.S. support for Israel’s offensive was pushing some Arab and Muslim voters away from Harris and toward Jill Stein, including in battleground states. In a CAIR poll cited by Reuters, Harris was receiving only 12 percent among Muslim respondents in Michigan, while Stein had 40 percent.
Then the votes were counted.
Harris lost Michigan by more than 80,000 votes. Reuters’ post-election analysis found that Arab Americans and Muslims were among the Democratic constituencies that either stayed home or shifted away from the ticket, with anger over Gaza and Lebanon specifically cited as a source of alienation.
Dearborn made the collapse impossible to treat as abstract. Biden had won the city with nearly 69 percent of the vote in 2020. Four years later, Trump received about 43 percent, Harris about 37 percent and Jill Stein nearly 19 percent. Official Dearborn election data confirms the dramatic shift. City of Dearborn election results
Gaza was a major political rupture inside a coalition Democrats could not afford to fracture. Hundreds of thousands of primary voters had already registered their protest. Arab American polling had already shown the damage. Muslim voters and organizers had spent months warning the campaign. The DNC still denied a Palestinian speaker. Harris still rejected the policy break those voters were demanding.
Then many of them left.
The larger public shift continued after the election.
By February 2026, Gallup found that 65 percent of Democrats sympathized more with Palestinians, compared with 17 percent who sympathized more with Israelis. Among Americans overall, 41 percent sympathized more with Palestinians and 36 percent with Israelis, a difference within the poll’s margin of error.
The Democratic establishment had spent years treating strong criticism of Israeli policy as something originating at the party’s activist edge.
But it became clear to see that while its own electorate had moved, leadership had not moved with it.
Who was allowed to describe reality?
American audiences did not need NAZA to learn that Gaza had been devastated.
They had photographs.
They had satellite imagery.
They had Palestinian reporters broadcasting while hungry, displaced and under bombardment. They had doctors describing wards without medicine and children arriving with injuries they could not treat. They had human-rights investigations, casualty estimates, demolished universities, mass displacement and the ruins of entire neighborhoods.
What NAZA adds is the voice behind the interface.
People who say they sat inside the military system now describe the calculations in its own vocabulary. The civilian becomes a number before the bomb falls. A family home becomes a target environment. A death toll that later appears in a newspaper as the tragic consequence of war is, according to the testimony in the film, sometimes part of the arithmetic preceding the strike.
The responsible response is still to scrutinize those claims. Anonymous testimony should be tested, corroborated and challenged. The Israeli military’s denials belong in the record.
But scrutiny cannot mean waiting indefinitely for the institution being scrutinized to supply the vocabulary through which its own conduct is understood.
That is the larger failure NAZA exposes. Not a shortage of information, but a hierarchy of credibility.
For years, Gaza was visible. What remained contested was whose description of that reality American institutions were prepared to trust. Major media organizations often granted official Israeli accounts the authority of explanation while Palestinian accounts were treated principally as testimony. Democratic leaders expressed horror at the consequences while continuing to support a policy that helped sustain the war.
Now Israeli insiders are describing the machinery themselves, and language that once sounded polemical can be heard as a description of process.
Early in NAZA, one of the film’s anonymous subjects offers a simple instruction:
“We have to describe things as they really are.”
After Gaza, it sounds almost like an indictment.
If Israeli journalists can turn the camera inward, if Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers can document what their own institutions have done, then the question for American leadership is no longer whether Gaza has been described clearly enough.
It is how much clearer it has to become before our own leaders are willing to describe it as it is.
