Naza and whose testimony we believe

Naza is being hailed as the definitive film on Gaza. Palestinian doctors have been showing us the same truth for three years. The question is why we only listen now.

Would anyone be calling it a masterpiece if a Palestinian had made it?

Daniele Rugo and I were asking each other that as we walked out of a screening of Naza at the Zurich Film Festival. Daniele’s own film, Life Support, which my organisation, Health Workers 4 Palestine, is proud to have backed as associate producer, was having its international premiere there. Between us, we had watched Palestinian doctors, nurses and journalists document the destruction of Gaza in real time for three years, many of them at the cost of their lives. Neither of us could remember their work being received like this.

Since its premiere in Venice, Naza has been greeted as a reckoning. Critics have called it essential, devastating, the new authority on what Israel has done in Gaza. Its directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, made the Oscar-winning No Other Land with their Palestinian colleagues Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. Their new film, produced with the Guardian and Jonathan Glazer, sits 24 anonymous former Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers on Tel Aviv rooftops at night and lets them explain, calmly and in detail, how they carried out the slaughter of Palestinians.

READ Life Support: doctors in Gaza bear witness to genocide

It is an important document, and it took courage to make. But our question would not go away. Had a Palestinian filmmaker brought us the same truth from the other end of the rifle, would it have premiered in Venice, been co-produced by a national newspaper, and been talked about for the Oscars? We both suspected we knew the answer.

The title is a Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage: the civilians Israel decides in advance it is willing to kill. The rules of engagement described in the film allowed for up to 20 of them per target. That number alone should end any remaining debate about intent.

Yet what stayed with me was not a statistic. It was the tone. These men and women are billed as whistleblowers, but whistleblowing implies conscience. What I heard instead was procedure: targets sketched on notepads, strikes recounted like shift handovers, homes full of families reduced to a ratio. Some had doubts about strategy, or about whether any of it worked. Remorse for the people they killed was almost entirely absent.

Their faces are hidden and their names will never be known. Palestinians who have criticised the film for shielding self-confessed war criminals are right to ask what accountability looks like when perpetrators are granted both anonymity and a festival premiere.

Doctors are trained to listen for what patients leave out. What these soldiers leave out is “sorry”.

And here is the thing: we never needed them to confess. The genocide has been on camera, in full, from the beginning. It was filmed by the people living through it, and by those who went in to treat them.

Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, directed by Karim Shah, documented the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health system: hospitals besieged, medics detained, colleagues killed. The BBC commissioned it and then refused to broadcast it. It took Channel 4 to finally show it, in July 2025.

Daniele’s film, Life Support, follows international doctors who entered Gaza between October 2023 and September 2025. It is compiled from footage they shot on their phones in overwhelmed wards and from the work of two Gazan cinematographers, Mahmoud Abou Hamda and Suleiman Hejjy. You see children treated on hospital floors, formula and pain relief and surgical instruments held at the border. More than 1700 health workers have been killed. Nothing on screen needs explaining.

Yes, most of the doctors speaking are white and British. But they know exactly why they are on screen. They centre their Palestinian colleagues throughout, the ones working marathon shifts while grieving their own families, and describe themselves as a vessel for those colleagues to be heard. That is the film’s Trojan horse. A familiar face from an NHS hospital brings in audiences who would never otherwise sit through a film about Gaza, and then hands the story back to the Palestinians it belongs to.

READ: Israeli army attacks NAZA film, distances itself from Gaza crimes

These films do not ask you to infer genocide from the testimony of those who carried it out. They show you its consequences on the bodies of children.

So why does Naza get the red carpet? Part of the answer is uncomfortable, and we should say it plainly.

Western audiences have been trained to treat Palestinian testimony as suspect. For three years, Palestinian doctors and journalists were dismissed as propagandists. The death toll, now more than 74,000, was footnoted as “according to the Hamas-run health ministry” until it could no longer be denied. Palestinian journalists have been killed in record numbers telling this story, and still their reporting was treated as a claim rather than a fact.

When an Israeli filmmaker presents the same reality through the mouths of Israeli soldiers, it suddenly becomes credible, essential, Oscar-worthy. That is not the fault of Abraham and Szor, who have consistently used their platform to amplify Palestinian voices. Szor herself has acknowledged that Palestinian journalists had been reporting all of this for years. It is the fault of an industry and a press that will only believe Palestinians once an Israeli vouches for them. That is not a higher standard of evidence. It is anti-Palestinian racism dressed up as balance.

Look at how other films have fared. The Mission follows the British-Iraqi surgeon Dr Mohammad Tahir through Gaza’s collapsing operating theatres, built from footage his own medical team shot on their phones. It is every bit as devastating and powerful as Naza. It shows the genocide through the eyes of an Arab doctor, and it was reportedly turned down by every major film festival. Gaza: Doctors Under Attack was shelved by our national broadcaster and only reached audiences through Channel 4, before going on to win a Bafta. Meanwhile, a film centring the perpetrators was co-produced by a national newspaper and celebrated in its pages.

I am not asking anyone to boycott Naza. Watch it. Let it strip away the last excuse anyone has for saying they didn’t know. But do not mistake it for the definitive account. That belongs to the people of Gaza, and to the doctors, nurses and paramedics, Palestinian above all, who stayed and kept working while their hospitals were bombed around them.

If you watch one film about Gaza this autumn, make it three. Watch Naza to understand how the killing was organised. Then watch Life Support and Doctors Under Attack to see who it was done to. And ask yourself which you were more ready to believe, and why.

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

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