BY SRH
In a tweet, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that people who “defame” the Israeli army should lose their passport.
His words show that the Israeli government is angry about the documentary NAZA, in which soldiers testified about war crimes happening in Gaza. In a video shared on social media, Netanyahu said he would bring two bills to Israel’s government.
Rachel Szor (left) and Yuval Abraham (right), directors of “NAZA” (Associated Press). “The first would take away the citizenship of anyone who insults [Israeli army] soldiers, and the second would hit them in the pocket by making the amount of money they can be sued for defamation twenty times larger,” Netanyahu said. “We will hit them both in the pocket and in citizenship, because they have no place among us.”
There have already been calls from Israeli ministers for NAZA directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor to lose their citizenship because of the movie.
Monday, Miki Zohar, the minister of culture, called the movie “despicable.” He also said that the fact that it won the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on Saturday was “shocking.”
Zohar said on X, “The creators’ burning self-hatred and their willingness to hurt their homeland in order to get praise from antisemites around the world is insane and a betrayal of the state.”
“These disgusting creators have betrayed the state, so I will take action right away to take away their Israeli citizenship.”
A part of the movie:
In the Gaza documentary NAZA, an ex-Israeli soldier says, “There was once approval to kill 500 people for one human target.” The documentary also includes testimony about “mass killing on an industrial scale” and AI-assisted targeting.
The movie shows interviews with 24 unnamed Israeli military and intelligence officials who talk about how they used AI-powered systems to find targets and launch remote bombings, even though they knew that many civilians would be killed.
A military insider who was interviewed for the film said that in one case, it was okay to kill up to 500 civilians in order to kill one high-value Hamas member.
The Israeli army denied the claims made in the movie.
