The Israeli government is promoting an online film project that mimics the style of NAZA, the award-winning documentary that details Israel’s mass killings of civilians in Gaza, in an attempt to counter the real film’s findings. The real documentary, directed by Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and produced by the Guardian, is in cinemas and will be shown in more than 50 countries. The Israeli government has denounced the film and announced plans to strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship, accusing them of treason.
In recent days, Israeli embassies have been promoting a link to a hastily produced online film entitled NAZA: The Real Story. Mimicking some of the style of the real documentary, including the use of anonymised interviews shot on rooftops in Tel Aviv, it is hosted on a website called nazadocumentary.com. Ariel Averbuch, an Israeli attorney and army reservist who made the new documentary, described it as an “offensive move” intended to shift the world’s focus from allegations about the Israeli military’s killing of civilians.
The film claims that Israel has the “most moral army in the world”. Another film-maker listed on the website for NAZA: The Real Story is Roi Danino, a candidate for the rightwing Israel First party. The website domain was registered on 16 September, six days after NAZA’s premiere at the Venice international film festival, where it won the special jury prize after receiving the longest ovation in the festival’s history.
Initially, the website falsely presented itself as a promotional page for NAZA itself, naming Abraham and Szor as the directors, and listing film festivals where the documentary was due to be screened. That wording was removed from recent updates of the website, once the video for NAZA: The Real Story had been added to the page. It now appears as a platform for the rival film, with a counter that implausibly suggests the short film has been watched more than 42m times. (The film’s official YouTube page is listed as having just 30,000 views.) According to a technical analysis, the discrepancy suggested the viewer counter could have been driven by requests made to the website, by humans or bots, rather than the number of people who actually watched the video.
When asked about the source of the 42m claim, Averbuch said he did not know and referred the questions to his tech team. The Israeli military has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza since the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, in a military campaign that a United Nations commission has described as genocide. The 24 interviews with Israeli military insiders in the original film NAZA detail how an AI-assisted apparatus of mass surveillance was activated during the Gaza war, revealing the systems that were used to target Hamas operatives in the knowledge large numbers of Palestinian civilians would also die.
The Israeli embassy to the US, which shared the new documentary on its social media, said the ministry of foreign affairs was not involved in producing the film, and that it had intended only to “amplify the message of its creators and expose wider audiences to arguments challenging and dismantling the blood libels and false allegations”. The Israeli government said on Thursday that it was awarding the film-makers with a certificate of appreciation “for their contribution to Israeli public diplomacy”, claiming the production had garnered tens of millions of views. A Guardian spokesperson said: “We are aware that the Israeli government has been promoting a film hosted on a website that initially – and falsely – claimed it was Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary.
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