An Al Jazeera investigation has exposed holes in claims that an Israeli counter-film to the acclaimed documentary NAZA achieved more than 44 million views. By examining domain registries, web archives, source code, and three independent traffic tools, the investigation exposed the fabricated numbers adopted by official Israeli entities to promote the film.
The original award-winning film, NAZA, draws on testimony from 24 unnamed Israeli military whistleblowers, accusing the army of using artificial intelligence-powered targeting systems to kill numerous civilians in Gaza. The documentary takes its name from the Israeli military term for civilian casualties expected in air strikes. After winning the special jury prize at the Venice International Film Festival and receiving a historic 25-minute standing ovation , the film was scheduled to screen in 56 countries.
The success of the original documentary triggered a political storm in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that the chief of general staff, the head of the Shin Bet, and the attorney general launch a comprehensive investigation into the participants and prosecute them for information security violations.
The film’s directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, were accused of treason, and Netanyahu and Culture Minister Miki Zohar threatened to revoke their Israeli citizenship.
To counter the film’s global resonance, opponents created a counter-film. On September 16, just days after NAZA premiered, the domain nazadocumentary.com was registered via Cloudflare, with the owner’s details hidden.
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine revealed the site initially disguised itself as the official NAZA website, listing the directors’ names and information on screenings and press. However, it described the film as exposing the systems behind the calculated mass killing of terrorists in Gaza. By September 30, this deceptive page vanished, replaced by a new title, “NAZA: The Real Story”.
The individuals behind the 49-minute counter-film are Ariel Averbuch, Roy Danino, and Hagai Gutman, who claimed the work was self-funded. Later, two more domains, whatisnaza.com and watchnaza.com, were registered to redirect users to the counter-film.
By the morning of October 14, the nazadocumentary.com website’s counter displayed 43,758,421 views, without disclosing the source of the number or how it was calculated.
Public platforms told a drastically different story. The full 49-minute version of the film on its official YouTube channel had not exceeded 130,000 views by the same date. This means the website’s counter displayed roughly 336 times the actual viewership. The YouTube channel had fewer than 2,000 subscribers, and the film’s account on X had only 170 followers.
Independent traffic analysis platforms confirmed the discrepancy. The US-based platform Semrush estimated the site’s total visits by October 8 at about half a million. Israeli-founded Similarweb estimated only 326 visits for September. Furthermore, the film’s domains were absent from the Tranco list of the world’s top one million visited domains.
An examination of the page’s source code revealed that the element displaying the huge number was internally tagged as “visitors” but displayed to users as “views”. The number is delivered directly from the site’s server, making its calculation method invisible from the outside. Upon opening the page, the counter begins at 97 percent of its value and counts up for three seconds, creating the illusion of a live counter.
Additionally, the site collects actual viewing data without publishing it, sending a “watch-tracker” file after about 25 seconds of video playback to identify the viewing session and parts watched, leaving it unknown whether the counter is based on this data.
Despite the seemingly fabricated metrics, official Israeli accounts spearheaded the promotion of the counter-film. The Israeli Embassy in Washington promoted it on October 3 on social media.
Tzipi Hotovely, head of Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate, awarded the three creators certificates of recognition for countering the original film. Hotovely said the film had garnered tens of millions of views, transforming an unsupported, fabricated number into an official talking point.
This elaborate digital campaign unfolds against the backdrop of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which began in October 2023. Since the conflict started, Israel has killed at least 74,000 Palestinians, including at least 21,000 children, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.