NAZA, Israel’s war on witnesses, and media complicity

When Israel barred international journalists from Gaza in October 2023, the explanation was for their “safety” claiming that reporters could not be protected in an active war zone. One year after the one-sided ceasefire, Israel’s excuse has been invalidated, yet the ban remains. Leaving behind, unchecked, the largest graveyard on earth, and an occupying army still refusing to let the world’s press see what is buried in it.

In April 2026, the Foreign Press Association, joined by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and the Union of Journalists in Israel, petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to end the military’s ban on foreign reporters entering Gaza, arguing that a “ceasefire” was in place, all captives had been released, and there was no substantiated threat to journalists. The government opposed the petition, this time invoking the war with Iran as a new justification. The excuses kept changing. The ban didn’t.

What has not changed is the price Palestinian journalists paid for doing the job Israel would not let anyone else do. Hundreds of local journalists have been killed, more than in all wars combined since Vietnam.

Three died together in January 2026, after the “ceasefire,” documenting a genocide. The message was clear: with foreign correspondents locked out, murder Palestinian journalists and bury war crimes with the children under the rubble.

The same Israeli script plays in the West Bank, where the threat is Jewish mobs, the state empowers. When journalists reported on Zionist Youth violence in Jannatah near Bethlehem in August 2026, soldiers declared the area a “closed military zone” and ordered the media out, while the youth mobs who attacked them, continued their rampage. In Hebron, the army designated a Palestinian rights defender’s home as a closed military zone after he complained of harassment by illegal Jewish settlers, sealing off the area and preventing journalists from documenting evidence of criminal activities.

Israel does not close these zones to stop Jewish lynching mobs, it declares them “military areas” the moment cameras arrive, turning the army’s power into a curtain to hide the crimes of Jewish youth.

This was always the plan. Controlling the discourse required controlling the witnesses: keep the press out, murder the journalists carrying those “threatening” cameras and let the Zionist Goebbels spew its hasbara to fog the truth. Chief among the Israel-first talking points was the claim that Israel’s civilian-to-combatant kill ratio in Gaza was better than America’s in Iraq or Afghanistan. It was a statistic tailor-made for cable news, precise-sounding, authoritative, and impossible to independently verify, because those who could have checked it were either excluded by the same news outlets from challenging the claim, banned from entering Gaza, or already murdered.

That is why the Israeli documentary NAZA received the attention it did. Its title comes from the Hebrew military acronym Nezek Agavi, a chilling term for the number of civilians expected to be killed and factored into Israeli intelligence assessments when making targeting decisions in Gaza. The film was made by Oscar winners Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. The film is based on testimony from twenty-four Israeli military and intelligence officers who spoke on camera anonymously. “There was once approval to kill 500 people for one human target,” one former Israeli soldier says in the film. Meanwhile, Israel’s military did not stay quiet, and instead of disputing, not just denying, it waged a witch hunt to identify the 24 Israeli soldiers and officers, most from intelligence units, who were interviewed in the film with their faces hidden.

I have written extensively, dating back three years, about Israel’s AI “mass assassination factory,” including a system called “Where’s Daddy?” that tracks individuals until they return home, then targets them, killing their family members as well.

The same accounts reported in NAZA were repeated again and again by Palestinian journalists throughout three years of Israeli genocide, only to fall on deaf ears. It is disheartening that it had to take two Israelis to break through the silence and, far too late, compel the world to acknowledge what Palestinians had been telling the world all along.

Israel’s ban was never about the life of international journalists; it was about controlling the story NAZA, now, threatens to unravel from the inside. If the civilian-to-combatant ratio Zionist and Israel-first American pundits claimed was true, why not open Gaza’s gates to debunk the movie and let the world do the calculation? Instead, it was closed, its internal witnesses murdered. But the truth was not to be denied, arriving now from the very people who carried out the pogrom.

The deeper indictment, however, belongs to the international media itself. Major outlets spent the last three years covering Gaza from a distance, editing and diluting the work of Palestinian freelance reporters, treating Israel’s ban on international journalists as a legal matter to be litigated, all while continuing to report comfortably from five-star hotels in Tel Aviv.

Just last Sunday, Trump announced that CNN, MS NOW, and Politico would be banned from the White House. American newsrooms erupted, rightly describing the move as an assault on press freedom. The response was swift: ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News suspended the White House TV pool, refusing to provide replacement coverage in solidarity with the banned networks. Yet those same institutions watched a foreign government bar them outright from an active genocide, not merely a briefing room, for three straight years, and treated it as normal business. Four news outlets turned away at the White House gate demanded a revolt. A closed border denied to an entire profession, and 260 murdered fellow journalists, barely registers.

This was not just about “Israel’s press ban.”  It was the world’s most documented military dictating the terms under which the war could be covered by the media: embed with the Israeli army or stay out. The same media industry that would have splashed such conditions across a colorful headline condemning Moscow or Beijing, or even Washington as non-democratic attacks on a free press, largely buried Israel’s ban, relegating it to the back pages, if it mentioned it at all.

The stark irony is that in Washington, Donald Trump’s infringement on American press access met with outrage and defiance; in Tel Aviv, Benjamin Netanyahu’s sweeping ban on the same media, under false pretenses, draws only compliance and silence.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.