Israel Gaza Documentary Controversy: Minister Threatens to Revoke Citizenship of ‘NAZA’ Filmmakers

by Anamika September 15, 2026

A film about how Israel’s military conducts its campaign in Gaza has stopped being just a film. Within days of winning a top prize at the Venice Film Festival, its two Israeli directors found themselves facing calls from a sitting government minister to strip them of their citizenship.

The documentary is called NAZA, made by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. It took the Special Jury Prize at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, and the backlash from Israeli officials was almost immediate. Culture Minister Miki Zohar accused the filmmakers of treason and said he intends to move to revoke their citizenship. What started as a story about a movie has turned into something much bigger: a fight over free expression, wartime dissent, and who gets to tell the story of the war at all.

What the Film Actually Shows

NAZA runs 80 minutes and digs into the systems Israel has allegedly used to select targets in Gaza. The directors spent over three years on it, speaking with 24 soldiers, intelligence officers, and whistleblowers, many of whom only agreed to talk anonymously. The film centers on claims that artificial intelligence played a role in target identification, and that military planners factored in expected civilian death tolls when approving strikes.

The Venice Film Festival’s own program notes describe the goal simply: to expose the machinery behind what the filmmakers call the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Some of the reporting the documentary draws on had already surfaced in investigations by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call so in a sense, the film is less a bombshell and more a culmination of work that’s been building for years.

Why the Government Reacted So Hard

Zohar didn’t mince words. He called the film an act of treason outright and said he’d push to have Abraham and Szor’s citizenship revoked, a punishment usually reserved for far more extreme cases, not filmmakers.

He wasn’t alone. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior figures in the military dismissed the film’s central claims, and Israeli officials have zeroed in on the fact that so many of the sources spoke anonymously, using that as grounds to question the documentary’s credibility. For their part, Abraham and Szor haven’t backed down. They’ve asked people to actually watch the film before forming an opinion on it, a fairly modest request, given the scale of what’s being thrown at them. The Guardian, which helped produce the documentary, has come out strongly in its defense too, framing the backlash as an attempt to silence work built on years of legitimate investigative journalism.

Venice Turned a Film Into a Flashpoint

The reception in Italy couldn’t have been more different from the one back home. NAZA got a standing ovation that reportedly stretched for around 25 minutes after its premiere, before going on to win the Special Jury Prize. That gap adulation abroad, accusations of betrayal at home is really the crux of the whole controversy. This isn’t new territory for Abraham and Szor, either. They were part of the team behind No Other Land, the documentary that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2025. So there’s a track record here of their Gaza-related work landing on the world stage while stirring controversy domestically. NAZA isn’t done traveling. It’s set to screen next at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in Spain, and then at the New York Film Festival later this month.

Dissent, Loyalty, and Who Gets to Decide

Strip away the specifics of this one film, and what’s left is a much thornier question: how far should a government be allowed to go when its own citizens publicly challenge how it’s conducting a war? People defending the filmmakers see this as exactly what journalism and documentary filmmaking are supposed to do: give whistleblowers a platform and hold power accountable, especially in wartime, when accountability is hardest to come by. Critics see it differently. They argue that airing accusations against the military mid-conflict risks damaging Israel’s standing internationally and paints an unfair picture of the armed forces.

Threatening to revoke someone’s citizenship over a film pushes that debate into much starker territory. It’s no longer just about whether the allegations in NAZA are accurate, it’s about whether criticizing your own government’s wartime conduct is something a democracy can tolerate, or whether it’s treated as disloyalty.

Outside Israel, the controversy will probably do what controversies like this usually do: drive more people to watch the film out of curiosity. Inside Israel, it’s shaping up to be a genuine test of whether dissent and national loyalty can coexist or whether, at least for now, they’re being treated as mutually exclusive.

FAQs

What is NAZA about?

NAZA is an investigative documentary by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor examining Israel’s military operations in Gaza through testimonies from Israeli military and intelligence insiders.

Why did Israel’s culture minister threaten the filmmakers?

Culture Minister Miki Zohar accused the filmmakers of treason after the documentary won a Special Jury Prize at Venice and said he would seek to revoke their Israeli citizenship.

Did NAZA win an award at the Venice Film Festival?

Yes. NAZA won the Special Jury Prize at the 2026 Venice Film Festival after receiving a major standing ovation at its premiere.