Why both films use the word Naza

A military acronym, not a brand

Naza is not a product name, a festival brand, or anyone’s private coinage. In Israeli military Hebrew it is the everyday abbreviation נז״א, built from the first letters of נזק אגבי (nezek agavi), the standard term for collateral, or incidental, damage. The Free Press put the point in ordinary language: the title of the Venice film “is an Israeli military acronym derived from nezek agavi, Hebrew for collateral damage.” The New York Times used the same derivation, writing that “NAZA” is “a Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi, or collateral damage.”

That is ordinary staff language. Hebrew marks acronyms with gershayim, the same convention that turns צבא הגנה לישראל into צה״ל. Officers say “naza” the way English-speaking militaries say “collateral damage estimate.” The word names a legal and operational problem every professional army is required to measure: if a lawful military objective is struck, some harm to civilians or civilian objects may still be expected. Israel’s legal papers, archived by the Jewish Virtual Library, restate the customary rule: attacks are barred when they are “anticipated to harm civilians excessively in relation to the expected military advantage,” a standard drawn from the principle of proportionality. The same papers are explicit about what the principle of distinction does not require. It “addresses only deliberate targeting of civilians, not incidental harm to civilians in the course of striking at legitimate military objectives.” Calculating naza is how a commander tries to apply those rules. It is not, by itself, evidence that civilians were the target.

Haviv Rettig Gur made the same distinction while discussing the Venice film. “Estimating civilian casualties of a future strike before ordering that strike is mandatory under international law,” he said. “It’s part of how you judge proportionality.” Treating that estimate as proof that killing civilians was the objective, he added, is “not just wrong,” because the calculation is “evidence that they were doing the calculations required to carry out a war morally.”

Nobody owns a working military abbreviation. It appears in briefings, legal advice, and after-action argument because the IDF, like other Western militaries, is required to distinguish combatants from civilians and to weigh incidental harm. Using the word does not confer a copyright on public debate about the word.

Two films, one public word

Two documentaries now carry that acronym because both are arguing, from opposite directions, about how Israel fought Hamas in Gaza and how civilian harm should be understood.

The first, NAZA, was written and directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. The Free Press reported that it premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on 10 September 2026 and won the Special Jury Prize. Fox News placed that premiere at the 83rd Venice festival. The New York Times and Breitbart both described an 80-minute film. The Times said it “consists of interviews with 24 people described as Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers” who, in the film’s own synopsis, were presented as revealing “the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” Those speakers were not identified. NPR’s Fresh Air likewise reported two dozen anonymous interviews, filmed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops, with appearances and voices altered. Those are the filmmakers’ and the festival’s claims, not findings of a court.

The Israeli military, which the Times said had viewed only excerpts, “excoriated the documentary for showing anonymous testimonies ‘from individuals whose identity cannot be verified.’” It also denied a specific accusation that a strike had been approved with about 500 expected civilian deaths, saying it “never planned, approved or carried out a strike in Gaza in which 500 civilians or anything near that number were anticipated to be killed,” and that it had “operated in accordance with international law.” The Times added that the military and Israeli commentators faulted the film for failing to acknowledge Hamas’s strategy of embedding terrorists and infrastructure among civilians. In a separate Jerusalem Post report, the paper wrote that the IDF “rejects NAZA’s claims that AI drives Gaza targeting,” and that “trained military and legal officials make strike decisions and assess civilian harm.”

On artificial intelligence, that military position matches the account given by Brig. Gen. (res.) Jacob Nagel in a Jerusalem Post essay republished by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Military orders and procedures explicitly prohibit relying exclusively on AI applications in situations involving human life without human involvement,” he wrote. “AI-based algorithms do not make decisions to launch an attack.” Authorized human personnel make those decisions “under close legal oversight.” The film’s title is therefore not the name of an artificial intelligence system. It is the name of the collateral-damage problem those human decision-makers are required to measure.

The second film is NAZA: The Real Story. On 2 October 2026 the Jerusalem Post reported that “a counter-film titled ‘NAZA: The Real Story’ is aimed directly at discrediting the claims made in the documentary ‘NAZA.’” Other posts the same week described it as a newly released Israeli documentary offered as a record of the war against Hamas in Gaza. The Venice film had already premiered, been awarded, and been widely reported by mid-September. The rebuttal was circulating in early October. Viewers can prefer one interpretation. They cannot pretend the Hebrew word was invented in Venice.

The shared title is therefore not a puzzle. Both films are about naza. One treats the acronym as the name of a crime. The other treats it as the name of a legal constraint under which a democracy fought a terrorist organisation that embeds among civilians.

The claim that the title was chosen to hide the other film

After the rebuttal appeared, some critics said the matching title was a hijack: that NAZA: The Real Story was designed to siphon attention or to bury the Venice film. That is a fair description of a polemical choice. It is not evidence of concealment.

A title chosen to hide another work would not add the words “The Real Story.” Those words announce a dispute. They tell a search engine, a journalist, and a sceptical viewer that a second account exists. Anyone who could find the prize-winner could still find it. The longer title is how the second film refuses to surrender the term the first film had turned into an indictment.

There is also a simpler point of Hebrew. Abraham and Szor did not mint נז״א; they borrowed a staff acronym and asked audiences to hear it as an accusation. The rebuttal borrowed the same public acronym and asked audiences to hear it as what it is in military law: incidental harm, which must be limited, not a synonym for intent to kill civilians. Rebuttals often keep the word they contest. That is argument, not identity theft.

Sceptics should still watch both, and should not confuse promotion, crowdfunding, or reserve rank with a verdict on the footage. The military’s written objections to the Venice film, and a rebuttal built as a counter-narrative, are separate things. So are anonymous testimony and on-the-record command. The honest test is not who used the acronym first on a poster. It is which account can be checked.

How to tell them apart

Length and credits are the fastest filter. Abraham and Szor’s NAZA is an 80-minute festival film, as the New York Times and Breitbart reported, built on 24 concealed-identity interviews and a Venice prize. NAZA: The Real Story is the later independent counter-film named on screen and on the film page. If the end card says “The Real Story,” it is the rebuttal. If the runtime is near eighty minutes and the speakers are fully anonymised throughout, it is the Venice film.

The deeper difference is the claim each makes about naza. The Venice film, in the military’s account of the excerpts it saw, treats expected incidental harm, and anonymous descriptions of targeting systems, as if they proved a policy of calculated mass killing. The military’s reply is that unintended harm from attacks directed at terrorist targets is not intent, that Hamas fights from among civilians, and that serious accusations require identifiable witnesses. International humanitarian law sits closer to that second grammar. The American Jewish Committee summarises proportionality as banning attacks “that may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, or excessive damage to civilian homes and structures that would go beyond the anticipated military advantage sought from the attack.” Israel’s own legal papers, archived by the Jewish Virtual Library, have long stated the same sequence: distinction, proportionality, precautions, and the rule that a military objective does not become immune because a defender has placed it in a civilian area. “The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations,” those papers recall. John Spencer, speaking to Breitbart about the Venice film, made the operational point in plainer English: calculating how much collateral damage the law permits is not evidence of a policy to maximise civilian deaths; it is how a force tries to stay inside the law.

None of that settles every disputed strike. Casualty figures from the war remain contested between Hamas-run health authorities, Israeli estimates of terrorists killed, and outside analysts, and this page is not the place to pretend otherwise. It is the place to say that a Hebrew abbreviation used in every serious army’s targeting process is not a trademark. Both films use Naza because both are fighting over collateral damage. The way to tell them apart is to read the subtitle, the runtime, the credits, and then to watch the film and the Venice work as two arguments, not as one title accidentally split in two.

Related reading: two films called Naza tell different Gaza war stories and naza: The Real Story — IDF soldiers on the record.