Israel promotes film that mimics NAZA documentary

Embassies post links to hastily produced online film echoing style of real Guardian documentary about mass killings of Gaza civilians

The Israeli government is promoting an online film project that mimics the style of NAZA, the award-winning documentary that details Israel’s mass killings of civilians in Gaza, in an attempt to counter the real film’s findings.

The Israeli government has denounced the film and announced plans to strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship, accusing them of treason.

Ariel Averbuch, an Israeli attorney and army reservist who made the new documentary, described it as an “offensive move” intended to shift the world’s focus from allegations about the Israeli military’s killing of civilians. The film claims that Israel has the “most moral army in the world”.

The website domain was registered on 16 September, six days after NAZA’s premiere at the Venice international film festival, where it won the special jury prize after receiving the longest ovation in the festival’s history.

“Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of terrorists in Gaza,” it said, distorting the film’s official synopsis by removing the reference to the deaths of Palestinian civilians.

It now appears as a platform for the rival film, with a counter that implausibly suggests the short film has been watched more than 42m times. (The film’s official YouTube page is listed as having just 30,000 views.)

The Israeli military has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza since the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, in a military campaign that a United Nations commission has described as genocide.

The Israeli embassy to the US, which shared the new documentary on its social media, said the ministry of foreign affairs was not involved in producing the film, and that it had intended only to “amplify the message of its creators and expose wider audiences to arguments challenging and dismantling the blood libels and false allegations”.

A Guardian spokesperson said: “We are aware that the Israeli government has been promoting a film hosted on a website that initially – and falsely – claimed it was Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary.

As well as its global cinema releases, NAZA will be available free on the Guardian’s website from late November.

Israeli government officials have scrambled to discredit NAZA’s content, while far-right activists have threatened to hunt down the directors.