Israel’s army orders a legal review of a Gaza documentary its own spokesman says it has not watched

“NAZA”, an 80-minute documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the pair behind “No Other Land”, screened at the Sala Grande of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on 10 September and took the Special Jury Prize over the weekend of 12–13 September. It is built on testimony from 24 former IDF soldiers and military personnel and concerns AI-assisted Israeli targeting in Gaza and the civilian deaths the filmmakers attribute to it. On Monday 14 September, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir instructed the Military Advocate General to “examine and advance possible legal measures concerning the film and those involved in it”, and separately ordered an investigation into the leaking of classified material used in its production. “Based on what has been published thus far, this is not a film offering criticism of the IDF, nor is it an attempt to establish the truth,” Zamir said, per the Jerusalem Post. “It is based on blood libels, deliberate distortions of reality, and grave, false accusations against IDF soldiers and commanders.” He called it “an attack on the State of Israel”, the Hollywood Reporter reported.

The same day, IDF Spokesperson Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin invited the filmmakers to allow military officials to view the film in full so that the army could respond in a “substantive manner” — a statement that concedes, in the IDF’s own words, that it had reacted only to clips posted online. Zamir has acknowledged he has not seen the film in full, according to the Hollywood Reporter. On Sunday, Culture Minister Miki Zohar raised revoking the citizenship of Abraham and Szor, saying they were willing to “harm their homeland in order to receive applause from antisemites around the world”. On Monday night Abraham was interviewed on Channel 13 by Raviv Drucker, who questioned the veracity of claims in the film; Abraham replied by accusing Israeli media of ignoring Gaza civilian casualties across three years of war. The film’s allegations are not independently confirmed. Israel Hayom reported the IDF’s counter-claim that the testimony is unverified and anonymous — itself a claim, not a finding.

Assessment: Note what is being contested and what is not. Nobody in the Israeli press disputes the sequence: the rebuttal preceded the viewing. That inversion is the pressure point, and it is on the record from both sides, which is why outlets from Israel Hayom to Times of Israel carry it identically. The Drucker interview matters more than the ministerial noise: a Channel 13 interrogation of the filmmaker’s evidence is the establishment press doing what a citizenship-revocation threat cannot, and it is the version that will travel domestically. Readers should hold two unproven claims in parallel — the film’s, and the army’s characterisation of it — and expect the leak probe, not the libel review, to produce the first concrete action.