Netanyahu attacks a Venice-winning documentary he says he has only heard of

NAZA, an 80-minute documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, won the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on Saturday 12 September, after a premiere on Thursday 10 September that the Times of Israel and AFP described as drawing a record-breaking ovation of nearly 25 minutes. The film draws on clandestine interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers, soldiers and whistleblowers, filmed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops, with faces and voices digitally altered; its title is a military acronym, Nezek Agavi, for the number of civilians expected to be killed in a strike. It was produced by The Guardian and James Wilson, with Jonathan Glazer as executive producer. Abraham and Szor previously co-directed No Other Land, which won the 2025 Academy Award for best documentary feature.

In a one-minute video statement on Monday 14 September — posted to Telegram according to Al Jazeera, to X according to JTA — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the film was “shocking” and that “we are fighting global anti-Semitic incitement, and when it comes from within us it is intolerable.” The Times of Israel noted what the wires did not: Netanyahu gives no indication he has seen the film, saying only “I heard of it, and it’s shocking.” He then turned to the campaign, calling on Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot to sever ties with the Democrats' Yair Golan, “who says that we are killing babies as a hobby.” Culture Minister Miki Zohar said he would act immediately to revoke the directors' citizenship and raised treason charges; Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir called the film an attack on the state and ordered a legal probe to identify its sources.

The military’s earlier line, on Friday 11 September, was narrower: it criticised the use of anonymous testimony, saying the whistleblowers' identities “cannot be verified,” including whether they served and in what capacity. JTA, citing a Foreign Ministry document obtained by Ynet — a single-sourced account whose Hebrew original we have not seen — reported that government agencies met Monday to coordinate a rebuttal and sent diplomats talking points accusing the film of turning “the truth on its head” and serving as a “disguise for Hamas propaganda.” Haaretz reported Monday that Israeli filmmakers had signed a solidarity petition; the live text says over a thousand, the article’s own URL slug says over 200, indicating the count was updated through the day. Accepting the prize, Abraham said: “The denial of a crime is what helps it persist, and that’s why it’s important for us that the Israelis see this film.”

Assessment: For a press desk the revealing detail is not the denunciation but its sequence. Netanyahu condemned a film not in wide release and, on his own account, unwatched; the army’s substantive objection is to the method — unverifiable anonymous sources — while the political objection is to the content. Both cannot be the real one. Note also who is arguing: The Guardian, which called Israel’s response “authoritarian,” is a co-producer, not a neutral observer. The claim that most deserves reporting out is Abraham’s counter-charge that Israeli media spent three years not investigating the army in Gaza. We have it only at snippet level, and it is the one allegation the state has not bothered to rebut.