NZA and the Language of “Collateral Damage”

Some films tell a story; in others, the public controversy surrounding the film becomes a story in its own right; and some are both. The documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, NZA – Collateral Damage, which won an award at the Venice Film Festival, belongs to the last category. Based on anonymous testimonies from 24 soldiers and intelligence officers who served in Gaza, the film is concerned not only with the consequences of the bombings, but with the system of decision-making that preceded them: the gathering of intelligence, the selection of targets, the assessment of the number of civilians who might be harmed, and the question of what constitutes justified “collateral damage.” Yet it seems that the public controversy surrounding the film misses the deeper question it poses to Israeli society.

Of course, one can dispute the reliability of one testimony or another, examine whether a particular recollection corresponds to the facts, and ask whether certain cases might constitute grounds for legal proceedings. But there is one question that cannot be avoided, and it is inscribed in the very title of the film: What does it tell us about the morality of a society that describes harm to innocent people in the professionally neutral language of “collateral damage”? In this vocabulary, a home becomes a “structure,” a family becomes a “number,” and a dead child becomes a civilian who happened to be near a target. Death itself becomes a datum within a system of professional calculations. This creates the psychological and moral possibility of observing catastrophe from a distance. It is precisely at this point that language loses its true meaning – and a society loses its moral bearings.

Even before the film was screened in Israel, its creators were subjected to vilification. They were branded traitors and accused of having “harmed IDF soldiers,” as though the army had a policy independent of that of the government. Netanyahu set the tone, calling for their citizenship to be revoked, apparently on the assumption that criticism of his government’s policies justifies the revocation of citizenship. The motives behind this incitement – electoral considerations and an attempt to divert attention from the government’s failures toward “traitorous leftists” – only reinforce Samuel Johnson’s famous observation that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” At the same time, it is important to note not only that the claims raised by the film have received almost no substantive response, but also that statements by official representatives and government ministers can themselves be read as reinforcing some of the film’s claims. For example, according to Israeli estimates, roughly one-third of those killed in Gaza were Hamas fighters. This would mean that roughly two-thirds were civilians or other non-combatants – raising, once again, the question of what is meant by “collateral damage.” In another example, in a tweet a few days ago, Defense Minister Israel Katz boasted that “there is now a security zone in Gaza, clean of residents and homes,” covering roughly 70 percent of the Strip. Even if we set aside the political context in which these words were spoken, it is impossible not to ask what the phrase “clean of residents and homes” actually means. What happened to the people who lived in those homes? Where did they go? And above all, how can emotionally sanitized terms such as “security zone,” “clean of residents,” and “collateral damage” make it easier for a society to evade its moral responsibility?

If the film examines the Israeli mechanism of decision-making, the account of the French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu, presented at length in his book Un historien à Gaza, allows us to reverse the perspective and look at the consequences from the other side. Filiu, who knows Gaza well, visited the Strip in December 2024 and confronted the profound gulf between the place he had known and what he encountered there.

Filiu begins his account by describing landscapes of devastation that recall Dante’s Inferno. An almost uninterrupted chain of ruins gradually transforms the destruction from a collection of separate sites into an entire landscape. In Khan Younis, a city he knew well, he encountered a landscape of craters, debris, and buildings that had lost their identity. Only a minaret remained standing where a mosque had once stood; an entire street was blocked by a collapsed building; and Dar al-Salam Hospital had been reduced to a mound of rubble. Filiu emphasizes that he had visited various war zones, but, in his words, he had never seen anything like it. The figures he cites convey the scale of the destruction: 87 percent of residential buildings were damaged, more than 80 percent of businesses were destroyed, and two-thirds of the road network was rendered unusable. But the numbers, impressive as they are, do not tell the whole story. Behind every collapsed building were entire lives; behind every vanished neighborhood was a social fabric; and behind every number are human beings, families, memories, and dreams.

The human meaning of the destruction emerges in the personal stories Filiu recounts. He describes people who have lost the ability to know where their homes once stood, people buried alive beneath the rubble, and families who have lost both their surroundings and the communities in which they lived. According to the figures presented in his account, some 1.9 million people were forced to flee their homes more than once. At the end of this process, there was no new home waiting for them, but rather a tent and less than two square meters of space per person.

One of the most harrowing examples of devastated Gaza is the story of the Mahmoud al-Fassi family. After being displaced repeatedly, the family found shelter in a tent on the seashore. On a cold and stormy night, their daughter Sila, just three weeks old, was trembling. The following morning, her parents found her dead. At Nasser Hospital, she was pronounced dead from hypothermia. This was the third case of its kind at the same hospital within forty-eight hours, following the deaths of a three-day-old baby and a one-month-old infant. It is difficult to read Filiu’s account and remain within the sterile language of “collateral damage.” Behind the term is a three-week-old baby; behind it are a father and mother trying to keep her warm; and in the morning they find their baby dead.

“Collateral damage” does not end with death and the destruction of the family unit. It extends into the most basic conditions of existence. Filiu describes open garbage dumps, barefoot children, tents that provide no protection from wind and rain, sewage pits dug into the sand, the smell of sewage, and the absence of privacy. Water may be the starkest example of the collapse of the most basic conditions of life. According to the figures he cites, before the war the daily allocation of water stood at approximately 80 liters per person, whereas by the end of 2024 it had fallen to roughly nine liters per person per day, of which about two liters were intended for drinking. Here too, the number conceals reality no less than it describes it. Nine liters are not merely a statistic. They are a person standing in line with a jerrycan, a child waiting for water, a family that does not know when it will be able to fill its container again.

The wounded and sick are forced to receive treatment under extreme conditions, while a healthcare system already unable to provide basic care must contend with shortages of equipment and personnel. According to the figures he cites, 1,000 dialysis patients and some 10,000 cancer patients lost essential access to treatment and follow-up care.

Ultimately, Filiu’s testimony complements the film. If the film is concerned with military decisions, Filiu is concerned with their human consequences. He begins with the person at the other end of the military decision: the family that has been displaced, the child searching for water, the baby who froze to death, the patient waiting for treatment, the doctor who continues to treat patients under impossible conditions, the city reduced to ruins, and a society that has been torn apart.

One can argue about figures, testimonies, or a particular military decision. But factual disputes cannot erase the moral question: What happens when an entire system becomes accustomed to describing human beings in terms that allow it to distance itself from the human meaning of its actions? “Collateral damage” is a term that organizes reality from the perspective of the military system. It sorts, classifies, and calculates. But it does not describe the experience of those who live on the other side of the term. In Gaza, there is no “collateral damage.” There is the loss of a home, a family, a body, a memory, and a future.

Once we define harm to human beings in technical and professional terms, it becomes easier to distance ourselves from its meaning. Filiu’s testimony does the opposite: it restores faces, families, fear, pain, and death to the terms and numbers. It places the concrete consequences of war before the abstract language in which war is described.

Israeli society can ignore reality; it can condemn the filmmakers and even continue to be enthralled by an empty showman devoid of substance. But none of this will absolve it of responsibility. And even if a thousand years pass, the wrongs committed in its name will never be washed clean.