What Does NAZA Mean?

• נזק אגבי (Nezek Agavi), collateral damage. The IDF says NAZA is the acronym of this term and calls it a professional term used by militaries. The filmmakers and The Guardian say it is used within Israeli intelligence for the civilian casualties expected from a strike.
• נזקי זוועות אוקטובר, the damage of the October horrors. It refers to the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, in which more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed, according to the United Nations.

The war the film examines began with the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. More than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed and 251 people were abducted into Gaza, according to the United Nations.

See more: October 7 footage

The Guardian describes “NAZA” as an acronym connected to the number of civilians expected to die in a military strike. Current reporting and the film use the term in discussions about what English-language military writing would often call collateral damage estimates.

The documentary uses that term as a lens for examining how civilian-harm calculations enter the targeting process.

The title frames the film around a difficult but concrete question:

When a military target is identified, how is expected civilian harm estimated, reviewed and weighed before a strike is approved?

NAZA argues that parts of this system became dangerously permissive during the Gaza war. The IDF rejects that portrayal and says the film misrepresents both the meaning of preliminary estimates and the much broader operational and legal process that follows.

Because the dispute is partly about where in the process a number is generated and how it is used, the title cannot be understood accurately without also reading the IDF’s detailed response.

No. The documentary discusses AI-assisted tools, but NAZA itself is not the name of Lavender or “Where’s Daddy?”

Those are different terms:

• NAZA: the film’s title, referring to anticipated civilian casualties in strike planning, according to the filmmakers and The Guardian.
• Lavender: the name used in 2024 reporting for an AI-assisted system said to help identify suspected Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives.
• “Where’s Daddy?”: the name used in reporting for a tracking process said to alert operators when a listed person entered a residence.

Confusing these terms can make discussions about the film much less precise.

In its October 1, 2026 response to NAZA, the IDF said the documentary presents a misleading picture of target planning and civilian-casualty estimation. It argues that interviewees describe limited or preliminary stages of a process that includes additional intelligence, operational and legal checks. A Guardian spokesperson said that portrayal of the interviewees is false and that they include officers and soldiers involved in several stages of the targeting process, including final authorisation.

The military also disputes the suggestion that preliminary casualty estimates function as simple authorization thresholds.

For readers, that creates a useful rule: whenever a NAZA number is discussed, ask who generated the estimate, at what stage, and what later approvals were still required, if those facts are known.

There is also a separate 2026 film titled Naza: The Real Story. Its creators are Roi Danino, Ariel Averbuch and Hagay Gutman, and it presents testimony from senior IDF commanders and intelligence officers about how they say the war was conducted.

The two productions are distinct.