Oct. 7: A Tale of Two Screens

As the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre approaches, two Israeli-made productions are offering the world sharply different accounts of the war that followed. One is "Naza," a documentary that premiered at the Venice Film Festival this month to a standing ovation lasting nearly 25 minutes, accusing the Israel Defense Forces of running a policy of mass civilian killing in Gaza. The other is the fifth season of "Fauda," the Israeli television drama now streaming globally on Netflix, which devotes two full episodes to recreating the Hamas-led attack itself, built in part on real footage from that day, much of it filmed by the terrorists.

The two productions arrived within days of each other, and the contrasts are shocking. "Naza" rests on anonymous, unverifiable testimony that the Israeli military says is riddled with internal contradictions and claims beyond what its own subjects could have known. "Fauda," despite being a work of fiction, hews so closely to the documented record of October 7 that one reviewer argued the season actually understates what happened that day.

"Naza" is an 80-minute documentary co-directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, built on interviews conducted over three years with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers who say they were involved in Israel's military campaign in Gaza. The interview subjects, whose identities are concealed, were filmed at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv, with their faces and voices digitally altered.

The film takes its title from a Hebrew military acronym meaning "collateral damage." Its central claim is that the IDF used an artificial intelligence system called "Lavender," which mines Gaza's mass-surveilled telecommunications network for phone calls, movements and interactions, to identify targets for strikes in which civilian deaths were anticipated and accepted in advance rather than treated as unintended consequences. One interviewee claims approval was given for a strike on a single Hamas operative despite the possibility that as many as 500 civilians could be killed. Others describe the process in stark terms. "It's like a video game because everything is done remotely," one says. Another calls it "insanely fun."

"Naza" received the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 12 and a standing ovation lasting 23 to 25 minutes at its premiere two days earlier, with some audience members holding Palestinian flags. Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, a member of the festival jury and director of last year's Gaza-themed "The Voice of Hind Rajab," praised the film at the post-awards press conference: "Those two brilliant directors found a way with the constraints of filming testimonies anonymously. And it's not about their feelings. They are cogs in a bigger machine. I found this just brilliant, necessary, and very important in a time when we are talking a lot about denial." 

Accepting the award, Abraham said, "We believe that the denial of a crime is what helps it persist, and that's why it's important for us that the Israelis see this film." He also credited Palestinian journalists with documenting events in Gaza before the filmmakers began their work, saying more than 200 of them have been killed by Israel.

"Naza" is produced by The Guardian and James Wilson, with "The Zone of Interest" director Jonathan Glazer serving as an executive producer.

The Difficulties and the Response

The Israel Defense Forces issued a formal rejection of the film's central allegations the day after its premiere. "The IDF categorically rejects these allegations," the Spokesperson's statement read. It went on to note that the film relies on anonymous testimonies from individuals whose identities "cannot be verified, including whether they served in the IDF, in what capacity, or whether they were involved in the matters about which the allegations are being made." 

The statement said the excerpts cited "include claims regarding national and military strategy that are clearly beyond the knowledge of junior-level soldiers," and pointed to what it called "internal and absurd contradictions," including the claim that unintended harm from lawful strikes was somehow simultaneously deliberate and part of "genocide." On the film's central technical claim, the IDF was direct: decisions on the selection and approval of strikes "are made by human personnel only... and not by artificial intelligence."

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett went further, calling the film a "blood libel" in a post on X the day after its premiere. "What makes it especially painful and infuriating is that this lie comes from Israeli filmmakers and is now being spread around the world," Bennett wrote. "If Israel wanted to hurt the people of Gaza, we would not send our sons and daughters to fight house to house, through alleyways and tunnels, at the terrible cost of our own soldiers being killed and wounded. The war in Gaza is terrible. The death of every child is a tragedy. But a terrible war is not genocide."

Culture Minister Miki Zohar announced he would move to revoke the directors' Israeli citizenship, calling them "despicable creators" who are "willing to harm their homeland in order to receive applause from antisemites around the world" and accusing them of "an act of treason against the state." National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called the pair "a disgrace and an embarrassment to the entire people of Israel" and told them, "I am certain that your friends, that is to say our enemies Hamas in Gaza, will welcome you with open arms." As a legal matter, Zohar does not have the authority to revoke citizenship on his own; Israeli law allows it only in narrow circumstances involving treason or espionage, and any such action would require further government and legal proceedings.

Writing in JNS, Fiamma Nirenstein, a senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, drew directly on her own reporting from Gaza to challenge the film's account. She described visiting IDF command tents at Tze'elim, where officers explained how strike decisions are issued in real time to protect both soldiers and civilians, and meeting the military lawyers who determine under international law whether a target is lawful. "Never in the history of warfare has an army done so much to try to protect the civilian population of its enemy," she wrote, calling the anonymous accusations in "Naza" "one of the oldest weapons in the arsenal of antisemitism: a blood libel."

The film is not the first collaboration between its directors to draw this kind of response. Abraham and Szor previously co-directed "No Other Land" (2024) with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, a documentary on Israeli demolitions and displacement of Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta, in Judea and Samaria. That film won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature after earlier wins at the Berlin Film Festival, the European Film Academy and the Gotham Awards, but drew the same charge now leveled at "Naza": that it presents a one-sided account. 

Critics writing in the Jewish Journal and for Creative Community for Peace argued the film "demonizes Israelis" by omitting the security rationale behind Israeli policy, noting that Israeli forces thwarted more than 1,000 terror attacks in Judea and Samaria in 2024 alone, and that it gave short shrift to the Hamas massacre of October 7. Zohar attacked that film as well at the time, calling its Oscar win "a sad moment for the world of cinema" and accusing it of "defamation" that "distorts Israel's image." Notably, "No Other Land" also drew fire from the opposite direction: the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel opposed the film on "anti-normalization" grounds, objecting to Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers working together at all.

"Fauda": The Series

"Fauda," created by Lior Raz and journalist Avi Issacharoff, follows an elite Israeli counterterrorism unit whose members disguise themselves as Palestinians to infiltrate terrorist networks. Its fifth season, an 11-episode run that premiered in Israel in the spring and arrived globally on Netflix on September 8, was rewritten entirely after October 7. The creators had already been developing a season built around a hostage-rescue plot when the massacre occurred. "That Saturday morning, we saw something way, way, way worse than what we tried to imagine then," Issacharoff said. The rewrite took roughly a year.

The new season is set two years after the attack and follows Doron Kabilio, played by Raz, and his team as they race to stop a new Hamas plot originating in Marseille, France. Episodes seven and eight break from the present-day storyline to depict October 7 itself, recreating the Nova music festival massacre and a family trapped in their reinforced safe room as terrorists set the door on fire. The episodes are shot to resemble news footage, dashcam video, and material filmed by the attackers themselves. Israeli broadcaster Yes, which airs the series domestically, issued a formal viewer warning before the two episodes for the first time in the show's history and made them free to watch across Israel in recognition of their significance.

"You try to be as close to reality as possible," Issacharoff said. "On the other hand, you cannot show everything, because it's too terrible." Raz told The New York Times, "I want them to look in my character's eyes, and to see what we felt on those days." Because the war in Gaza was still underway while the season was being written, the creators deliberately steered the story away from Gaza almost entirely, setting most of it in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East instead.

The production carried its own losses. Cast member Idan Amedi was seriously wounded while serving in the Combat Engineering Corps in Gaza and, for a time, said he would not return for the new season. Longtime crew member Matan Meir was killed in December 2023 by an explosion from a booby-trapped tunnel shaft beside a mosque in Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza.

Within a day of its Netflix release, Season 5 ranked seventh among the platform's 10 most-watched shows in 43 countries. It later reached No. 1 in Lebanon, No. 2 in Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, No. 3 in Qatar, Oman and Kuwait, and No. 4 in Egypt, despite a Lebanese boycott campaign that has previously accused Netflix of violating the country's anti-Israel law by carrying the series. Episodes seven and eight each received a 9.3 rating on IMDb.

Raz said the international response caught the show's creators off guard. "The success on this level surprises us," he told Ynet. "We did not expect the intensity of the response around the world, or what we are seeing on social media, and certainly not what is happening with Fauda in Arab countries." Issacharoff added, "Our hope was to bring the entire world a story that burned inside us and inside every Israeli who experienced October 7. People always say, 'An outsider won't understand.' We hope that this time, outsiders will understand a little better."

Viewers from countries with no direct stake in the conflict described being shaken by what they saw. An Israeli social media influencer wrote that her feed had filled with shocked, sympathetic posts from Dutch and German viewers. A Brazilian cartoonist wrote that the episodes were "far more difficult to watch than a fictional drama," in part because he knew the Israeli cast and crew were recreating events that had struck their own families, friends and colleagues directly. A viewer from Texas called episodes seven and eight "simply unforgettable." Others described crying through the episodes or being unable to speak afterward.

One viewer in India argued that the season actually understated the reality of October 7 rather than exaggerating it. "The series offers only a small glimpse into the atrocities of October 7," the viewer wrote, noting that it did not depict women who were raped and burned alive, families tied together and dismembered, or the killing of pregnant women and children. 

The viewer specifically cited Kfir Bibas, kidnapped at nine months old and later murdered in captivity alongside his four-year-old brother Ariel, and fathers doused in kerosene and set on fire while their attackers laughed. "No film or television series can truly recreate the horror of such a pogrom," the viewer concluded. "'Fauda' is a fictional work, but it draws inspiration from real events. October 7 was not a fictional story; it was a real tragedy, and the victims deserve to be remembered as events truly occurred."

Not every reaction was favorable. A viewer from Libya argued the season presented "a biased narrative" that "maligns Palestinians and distorts their struggle," and one reviewer criticized the October 7 episodes as constructed "too much like an action sequence," calling the approach "exploitative even if meant as a tribute," and noted that the season leaves the toll of the two-year war in Gaza almost entirely off screen. Coverage in Qatar's Al-Araby Al-Jadeed and in Yemen accused cast members, including Amedi, of having "participated in the war of genocide against Gaza."

The gap between the reception "Naza" received in Venice and the substance of the IDF's rebuttal is not an isolated case. It fits a pattern researchers have documented across the reporting and the culture surrounding the Gaza war.

A Spring 2025 study in Middle East Quarterly by Andrew Fox of the Henry Jackson Society and Tatiana Glezer of Fifty Global examined coverage of Gaza casualty figures across eight major outlets, including CNN, the BBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters and the Associated Press. The study found that only 3 percent of the outlets cited specific figures for combatant casualties, and that Hamas-supplied figures were cited in 100 percent of the publications sampled while Israeli figures appeared in only 4 percent. 

Nearly half of the articles that cited IDF data flagged it as unverifiable; only 1 percent did the same for Hamas figures. The study also found that Israel has achieved one of the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios in modern warfare, roughly 1.4 to 1, compared to figures as high as 5 to 1 in the Iraq War.

That same asymmetry has surfaced repeatedly on the red carpet. At the 2024 Academy Awards, stars including Billie Eilish, Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef wore a red enamel pin distributed by the group Artists4Ceasefire, showing a hand with a black heart inside a red circle, meant to call for a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of the hostages. 

To many Jewish observers, the image evoked something else: the 2000 lynching of two IDF reservists in Ramallah, in which a mob displayed blood-soaked hands from a window to a cheering crowd below, one of the defining images of the Second Intifada. Noa Tishby, who briefly served as Israel's antisemitism envoy, called wearing the pin a "display of Jew-hatred" and noted that the same celebrities were conspicuously not wearing the yellow pins representing the hostages Hamas had taken on October 7. 

That same ceremony gave its award for Best International Feature to "The Zone of Interest," whose director, Jonathan Glazer, used his acceptance speech to draw a line from the Holocaust to the war in Gaza, saying his film shows "where dehumanization leads, at its worst." Glazer went on to serve as an executive producer of "Naza."

The pattern held at Venice as well. Palestinian flags were visible among the crowd during "Naza's" 25-minute ovation, a year after Kaouther Ben Hania's "The Voice of Hind Rajab," centered on the killing of a six-year-old Palestinian girl and the medics who came to save her, took one of the festival's top prizes. It is now two consecutive years in which a film built around allegations against Israel has dominated the world's most prestigious film festival.

Three years after October 7, the pattern is consistent. An anonymous, contested allegation against Israel migrates easily into headlines, into casualty counts and onto the world's most prominent stages. The documented, verified record of what was done to Israel that day struggles for the same reach, even when, as with "Fauda," it arrives in the form of the most-watched drama on Netflix.

Originally published at Israel 365