In most societies people who describe as “fun” deliberately blowing up blocks of flats in the certain knowledge that they contain large numbers of children and other innocent people would be its most depraved psychopaths. In Israel they are its left-leaning, social and military urban elite. That is how they see themselves.

NAZA, from which this documentary directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor takes its name, is the Israeli military acronym for someone they know to be a civilian unconnected with Hamas. It is used to describe a two-year-old child, a mother aged thirty or an eighty-year-old man in a wheelchair. It means a person they know poses know military threat.

Not being a member of Hamas or even despising them is irrelevant. The former Israeli soldiers who agreed to be interviewed for this astonishing film explained that for a low level Hamas operative they were allowed a quota of up to twenty NAZA, which just means civilians who happened to be in his vicinity. In some cases, they were allowed to kill up to five hundred, which in practice meant blowing up several blocks of flats with everyone inside them.

One of the remarkable things we learn from an interviewee is that this elite unit in which he served did not consider themselves Arab haters. They were mission focussed and goal orientated; the contemporary management speak for only following orders.

A couple of the interviewees seemed unrepentant about what they did and others gave the impression of being traumatised by it. One talked about how his colleagues would watch the unburied corpses being eaten by the dogs which live among the rubble. These women and men are among the most highly educated and admired in Israeli society and their defence is no different from the highly educated, cultured Germans of the 1940s who were doing identical things in Poland and Ukraine. They were part of something bigger and if they didn’t do it someone else would. One explicitly compares his actions as a soldier to that of the Nazis.

Killing humans for sport

Horror follows horror in the series of nocturnal rooftop interviews. We are told by one that his unit would decide on an arbitrary death line for their zone of control. Any Palestinian who crossed it would be shot even though the Palestinians had not been told where it was. The corpses marked the boundary.

Food was distributed from a centre which had to be accessed by a bridge. Anyone using the dried-up gully to get there ahead of others was shot by snipers, sometimes dozens in a day. This was pheasant shooting by elite troops using human targets.

A recurring theme was that this licence to kill indiscriminately was explicitly and implicitly being transmitted through the whole Israeli army by its senior commanders and the country’s politicians.

Netanyahu’s regime made a strategic decision early on to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza. It was done methodically by making most of the territory incapable of sustaining human life. People were given notice to quit their homes and when the algorithm had decided 75% of civilians had left, all the building in that section would be destroyed. Anyone too scared or too ill to move was murdered. The body count was part of the mission.

A major defence of the mass murder of civilians by people like Simon Schama and other supporters of Israel is that Hamas are using its people as human shields. The interviewees explain that the IDF was using a technique called “Where’s Daddy?” They have access to every mobile phone in Gaza and software provided by big tech companies like Palantir. When they heard a child say on her phone that she was with her father the home and everyone in it would be destroyed. The Israelis use the families to locate the Hamas operatives and kill everyone near them.

Rachel Szor , Yuval Abraham and those who worked with them have made a vitally important historical document in which we get first hand accounts from men and women who helped develop the techniques for modern genocide. Several people were in tears at the end of the screening. My recommendation is that you should watch this in a cinema so that your focus is unbroken for the full seventy-seven minutes. This is a crucially important and sombre film which should be seen by anyone who wants to understand how Israel is using the most sophisticated technology humanity has created to wreak barbarous war on the people of Gaza.