“I’d hear the final moments of a person’s life.” The Israeli military insider pauses. He is composed and soft-spoken, seated on a darkened rooftop against the night sky. His face and voice are digitally altered — protected by anonymity.“What did you hear inside a home?” the journalist asks. “Sounds of normal life,” he responds. “A prayer, the TV, a baby, a husband and wife talking.”By this point in the film, we’ve learned about the Night Location project, in which the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) hack into the phones of Palestinian civilians they suspect of being Hamas operatives. They’re easiest to target in their homes at night, the insider explains.“How could you bomb when you hear a baby inside?”Another pause. “The goal is to destroy.”This exchange is one of many in NAZA, a new investigative documentary by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the co-directors of the Oscar-winning No Other Land.Produced by The Guardian and JW Films, the film features interviews with 24 anonymous Israeli intelligence officers and military personnel, filmed in Tel Aviv. They describe how artificial intelligence and automated surveillance were used as military tactics to shape the targeting of Palestinians in Gaza after Oct. 7, 2023.Its title, NAZA, comes from a Hebrew military acronym for nezek agavi, or “collateral damage.” The term is used as a euphemism for the number of civilians expected to be killed in a strike.After its world premiere at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival in September, NAZA won the Special Jury Prize and received a record-breaking standing ovation. This month, it began screening at select Canadian venues like Hot Docs in Toronto and the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montréal.The film provokes uncomfortable questions about accountability — and about journalism itself.Listening to perpetratorsNAZA has drawn criticism from the Israeli government, which has threatened to revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship. The Israeli military has also said the film contains fundamental errors. But a different critique has emerged from the other direction: from those who question the ethics of whose testimony the film chooses to centre and protect.Nora Barrows-Friedman, an editor and author who has reported from Israel, is one of them. “I have a kind of general revulsion toward the genre of film that people refer to as ‘shooting and crying,’” she said in an interview with Palestine House of Freedom, an American-based non-profit that advocates for Palestinian freedom, equality and human rights.In Hebrew, this genre is known as yorim ve'bochim. It describes media, literature or public statements in which soldiers or citizens express remorse, moral conflict or grief over violence they took part in while continuing to carry it out or defend the system behind it.“These filmmakers are literally protecting the identities of these genocidal soldiers as though people committing genocide have a legitimate right to be protected from accountability,” Barrows-Friedman argues.Gur Tsabar, executive director of the Movement Media Hub, a public-relations agency supporting social justice movements, expressed similar views. In a Facebook post that drew more than 3,000 likes, he wrote that he was “skipping NAZA.”His reasoning? The atrocities being described in the film are nothing new. Palestinian journalists, of whom at least 203 have been killed by Israel, have been documenting them since the start of the war.He also points to a double standard that many journalists have noticed in western coverage of Israel-Palestine: Palestinian victims of Israeli violence are challenged more than Israeli victims of Hamas attacks.My own research suggests the same pattern. In a study I conducted of Canadian coverage in the three months after the Oct. 7 attack, for example, a producer at a mainstream Canadian news outlet told me that Palestinian sources and story ideas are often subjected to an added burden of proof that Israeli ones are not. In one case, the producer was told to fact-check a guest’s account of a family member killed in an Israeli airstrike.“I would need a death certificate and a family tree,” the producer said. “I’ve never been asked to fact-check a guest’s personal sensitive claims before.” NAZA’s official trailer. The importance of anonymityThese critiques raise difficult questions for journalists seeking to decolonize their own practices and to examine whose voices their reporting protects and amplifies. Chief among them: Is it ethically defensible to grant anonymity to sources describing their participation in acts that may violate international law?NAZA’s filmmakers treat their interviewees as both confidential journalistic sources and as witnesses to potentially serious crimes. That dual role is not unusual for journalists exposing wrongdoing by a state. Insiders are often the only people who can describe how a system works from within, and they rarely speak without protection.Consider Edward Snowden, the former contractor for the United States National Security Agency who leaked classified documents exposing global surveillance programs. When The Guardian broke the story in 2013, Snowden was an unnamed insider source. This case illustrates the journalistic principle at work: anonymity and source protection in journalism can bring to light what otherwise would remain hidden forever.NAZA would not exist without the anonymity granted to its sources, and there is little doubt the film is having an impact. At the screening I attended, the audience sat in pin-drop silence as the credits rolled.What journalism owesThe ultimate goal of documenting atrocities in journalism is accountability for war crimes, and that remains nowhere in sight. But what is clear, however, is that the film has significantly unsettled Israeli audiences. That includes liberal Zionists, many of whom continue to hold the Israeli military in high regard or reject the characterization of Israel’s devastation of Gaza as genocide. Read more: How to decolonize journalism — Podcast Ameer Fakhoury, an analyst at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, says opinion polls indicate that about 80 per cent of Jewish Israelis support the destruction being inflicted on Palestinians. They are arguably among those who most need to see NAZA.The absence of accountability, additionally, presents an ethical question of its own: What role, if any, do journalists bear in ensuring potentially criminal sources face justice?As journalists, our job is not to prosecute sources. It is to gather and verify information, expose wrongdoing and bring it to public attention. The result is a record that can inform public debate and, potentially, legal proceedings. Is there tension, or moral discomfort, in that? Yes. But the truth is a necessary starting point, even when it comes from people who may never face consequences for what they admit to.Palestinian journalists told this story first, and many died telling it. NAZA does not replace their record. It corroborates it. And so the question shouldn’t be whether NAZA’s sources deserve anonymity. It’s whether, without it, we would ever have heard them confess at all.Shenaz Kermalli does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.