'Bibi's Department': NAZA shows how Israel used affairs and gay relationships to blackmail Palestinians
Israel spied on Palestinian survivors of war crimes and used compromising information about them to sabotage petitions to international courts, according to interviews featured in the documentary NAZA.
The film, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by The Guardian, is in cinemas in the UK and the US and will be shown in more than 50 countries.
It features interviews with 24 anonymous Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, who describe how they killed innocent Palestinians in Gaza.
One part of the film features interviewees who worked in what they call "Bibi's Department", a special unit working for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
"We were the department above all the other departments," says one interviewee in the film.
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"The more war crimes we committed, the more pressure there was" on the international stage, an intelligence officer says.
This was the problem "Bibi's Department" allegedly set out to tackle.
Interviewees say that Palestinian survivors of war crimes in Gaza "were seen as a security threat" and were spied on by Israel.
"Bibi's Department", they say, worked to thwart legal petitions by Palestinians to The Hague.
They used compromising evidence gathered from spying on the Palestinians to put pressure on them, particularly evidence of romantic "affairs" and "homosexual relationships".
Cases at The Hague were pulled because of this, one intelligence officer says.
Any connections "between Palestinians and international officials" were seen as a problem, interviewees claim in the documentary.
"We collected intelligence that went to the prime minister."
One interviewee says that "Bibi's ultimate goal was to prevent a Palestinian state".
The title of the film, NAZA, is a Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage.
The rules of engagement described in the film allowed for up to 20 civilians being killed per target, although one interviewee in the film said a target was approved that would result in up to 500 Palestinian civilians being killed. The Israeli army has denied any such target was approved.
The film mostly involves interviews on Tel Aviv rooftops at night. The whistleblowers have their faces hidden.
Netanyahu has been so angered by the documentary that earlier this week he ordered Israel's attorney general and head of its Shin Bet security service to reveal the identities of the interviewees and prosecute them for causing "harm to Israel’s diplomatic and security interests".
Last month at the Venice international film festival, NAZA won the special jury prize after receiving the longest standing ovation in the festival's history.
The Israeli government has threatened to strip the film's directors of their citizenship.
Israel's attempts to undermine international courts have been well documented. Middle East Eye has reported extensively on the Israeli campaign to remove Karim Khan as ICC chief prosecutor.
The US sanctioned the ICC itself earlier this month.
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