A petition launched on Monday pulled about 1,500 names into the fight over NAZA, with prominent Israeli filmmakers backing Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor after the documentary drew backlash at Venice Film Festival. The appeal said the directors were facing an unprecedented campaign of incitement and that the line between that and physical threat was narrowing.
The timing matters because the film had only just returned from Venice Film Festival, where it won the special jury prize after a 24.5-minute ovation. In Venice, Abraham said he and Szor intended to go back to Israel, adding that their lives, families and friends were there and that the film was meant to push toward a political solution and a better life for Palestinians and Israelis.
Among the signatories were Ari Folman, Nadav Lapid, Orna Ben-Dor Niv, Hagai Levi and Shlomi Elkabetz. The petition called on people who still believe in freedom of expression to show support and solidarity with Szor and Abraham, and it argued that art and journalism should reflect society even when the reality is hard to face.
NAZA has already become a magnet for political pressure because of what it depicts. The documentary, shot in secrecy at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, says it lays out the systems behind Israel's calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and includes interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers, along with allegations that Israel used artificial intelligence to identify targets and strike homes knowing families were inside.
That account has not gone unanswered. An Israeli military official denied the allegations in a conversation with the, while Israel's culture minister, Miki Zohar, threatened after the Venice premiere to revoke the citizenships of the co-directors. On Monday, Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir reportedly told the military's top legal official to examine possible legal action against the film, showing that the dispute has moved from public outrage to the edge of formal state response.
Whether Abraham and Szor have already returned to Israel remains unclear, but the petition now places them at the center of a wider struggle over who gets to tell this story and at what cost. The backing from Israel's film community suggests the pressure campaign has not isolated the directors; it has widened the argument around NAZA and made the next move from the military or the government the one to watch.
