Since NAZA – an acronym for Nezek Agavi, Hebrew for “collateral damage” – a film exposing the inner workings of Israel’s killing machine in the Gaza Strip, won a special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival, Israel’s political establishment and much of the Israeli media have launched a witch hunt against its directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and their sources, who are IDF soldiers and officers.They have called them antisemites, terrorists or supporters of terrorism, and sought to strip them of their citizenship. The IDF chief of staff ordered legal proceedings to be initiated. The IDF opened an investigation and also asked the Shin Bet to intervene.The Foreign Ministry distributed talking points to Israeli embassies around the world describing the film as “Hamas propaganda disguised as documentation.”The Israeli website YNET revealed that Israel’s embassy in Rome had warned the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem a month earlier about the film’s participation in the Venice Film Festival. The embassy tried to “use friends and lawyers to exert its influence to prevent the screening of NAZA on the grounds that it was registered for the festival late and other arguments, or at least to balance the film.” The festival rejected all the pressure and requests.The campaign against NAZA is part of a much longer pattern. Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, Israel has repeatedly tried to persuade the world that what it hears its elected officials and senior public figures say is not what they meant, and that what it sees Israeli forces doing is not what they are doing.Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor look drawn and solemn amid strong applause for Golden Lion Contender ‘NAZA’ exposing Israeli targeting of civilians in Gaza #VeniceFilmFestival pic.twitter.com/hqyzoZhwHM— Deadline (@DEADLINE) September 10, 2026Israel has sought to portray calls by its elected officials and senior public figures to kill, destroy, starve and burn Palestinians in Gaza and erase their communities as something other than criminal incitement. Statements heard around the world, the argument goes, were taken out of “context” or merely reflected an emotional outburst.The Attorney General has accordingly granted blanket immunity to those making such statements. For example, on April 27, 2025, she decided not to open a criminal investigation into a complaint I filed on behalf of Combatants for Peace alleging incitement to genocide, terrorism and violence after Finance Minister and member of the government’s security cabinet Bezalel Smotrich said on April 29, 2024: “There is no half measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total destruction. ‘You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven’ – there is no place under heaven.”On March 16, 2026, the State Attorney likewise decided not to open a criminal investigation into a complaint I filed on behalf of Tag Meir Forum against dozens of influential rabbis who, on October 10, 2023, published a letter stating that “there should be no consideration for the enemy’s civilian population,” that “in wartime, the best of snakes, crush his head” and “Do not heed weakening voices seeking twisted legal excuses to limit the fighting.”Among the signatories were Rabbi Dov Lior, considered the rabbi of the Hilltop Youth, who ruled that Baruch Goldstein, who carried out the massacre of Muslim worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs, was “holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust,” and Rabbi Uziyahu Sharbaf, who was convicted of murder and attempted murder and sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in terrorism at the Islamic College in Hebron.Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor say their new Gaza documentary exposes a “system of killing”, drawing on testimony from 24 Israeli military and intelligence figures whose identities were protected. pic.twitter.com/3feg0FOQNP— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) September 10, 2026The same pattern has applied to Israel’s military conduct in Gaza. Israel has sought to portray the massive destruction of high-rise buildings, public institutions and entire neighbourhoods, as well as the killing of civilians, journalists, aid workers and hungry people waiting for food and assistance, as legitimate and lawful.The Attorney General and the military prosecution have not merely provided legal cover for the policies of mass starvation, killing and destruction in real time; they have also granted blanket immunity, retroactively, to the security forces that carried them out.In a response dated September 8, 2026, which I received following a Freedom of Information request, the IDF disclosed that “thousands of reports of exceptional incidents were identified” in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Of 132 incidents examined through the General Staff mechanism and referred to the military prosecution, 55 involved civilian deaths, five involved “human shields,” 15 involved damage to civilian property, 11 involved damage to shelters for displaced people or vital civilian infrastructure, 13 involved humanitarian aid organizations or their employees, and 33 involved medical workers or facilities.To date, only a handful of indictments have been filed, primarily in cases involving looting. The slow pace and limited number of cases suggest once again that the IDF cannot and does not want to investigate itself. The resulting immunity gives legitimacy to the continued commission of further crimes.But Israel’s policy of revenge did not begin with the current war in Gaza, nor can it be explained solely as a response to the massacre carried out by Hamas and the abduction of Israelis. Between 1950 and 1956, the IDF carried out 122 reprisal operations, some of which harmed Palestinian civilians, including the operation in the village of Qibya, where about 45 homes were blown up and about 60 civilians were killed. The accepted Israeli term is “reprisal,” but in practice these operations involved revenge.The logic persisted. On June 29, 1982, amid worldwide condemnation of Israel’s massive bombardment of Beirut, Prime Minister Menachem Begin said in the Knesset that “for the past three weeks the world has been awash in the filth of lies,” accusing the IDF of “genocide and massacre.” He argued that the criticism was hypocritical, given the Allied bombing of population centers in Germany during World War II. Similar arguments are still used by Israel today.Today in Ashdod: A man removed inciting graffiti targeting “NAZA” directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, replacing the word ‘traitors’ with ‘heroes’.” pic.twitter.com/ieCzPJ18cr— Oren Ziv (@OrenZiv_) September 16, 2026A classified assessment by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, prepared in June 1984 and declassified in 2016, stated that “the commitment to a policy of reprisal is deeply ingrained in the Israeli military establishment.” It said that Israel had moved from simple “‘eye for an eye’ operations” to “a fully developed doctrine of retaliation,” under which terrorism could be confronted by “attaching an unacceptably high price tag to such actions.”The document also warned that IDF operations against terrorists operating from civilian areas, “No matter how professionally they were conducted militarily,” damaged Israel’s prestige, the image of its military and its relations with friendly countries.More than a year into the current war, a New York Times investigation published on December 26, 2024, found that the policy of showing little real regard for civilian life was official and embedded in the rules of engagement updated on October 7.According to the investigation, mid-level IDF officers were authorised to strike thousands of lower-ranking Hamas fighters and military sites that had not previously been considered high-priority targets, even when there was a significant chance of killing civilians – up to 20 in a single airstrike and more than 100 if the target was a Hamas leader. As the permitted level of collateral damage expanded, unreliable methods were adopted to identify targets and estimate civilian casualties, while serious post-strike reviews were not conducted.Whatever the legal questions surrounding these rules, the policy reflected a conception of revenge that extended beyond those who had directly harmed Israel, its forces or its citizens to their family members, neighbours and bystanders – and, in practice, as the results on the ground demonstrated, to the entire Palestinian population of Gaza.It is obvious that at least the senior leadership knew that the cumulative effect would be the deaths of large numbers of civilians. Once the strikes were carried out, they saw the actual numbers of dead and wounded. Yet none of this led to stricter rules of engagement.There you have it: a policy of revenge has always existed in Israel, but in the latest war in Gaza it reached monstrous proportions, and the whole world heard and saw it. Israel is trying to silence the creators of NAZA but cannot silence the truth.Eitay Mack is an Israeli lawyer and human rights activist.