Eyal Zamir, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, pledged to use “every tool at our disposal” against the documentary, which features anonymous interviews with 24 intelligence officers and soldiers, most involved in remote strikes in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for legislation that would let the state strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship. Israel’s culture minister has asked the Interior Ministry to investigate them for treason. Activists and staff members from the far-right party of Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir protested outside Szor’s parents’ house, where a speaker called for Abraham and Szor to be executed and their families’ homes demolished, as often happens to the homes of Palestinians.

The official calls for persecution of Abraham and Szor, who previously made the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land” with two Palestinian filmmakers, seem strategically unwise, since they’re spurring heightened interest in “NAZA.” A press screening I went to on Wednesday, at New York’s 268-seat Walter Reade Theater, was at capacity, and I was told to arrive a half-hour early to get a seat. This is, in my experience, very unusual for documentaries of any sort, even those that, like “NAZA,” win the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

After seeing it, I can understand why Israel finds it so threatening. Its subjects described factory-scale targeting, enabled by artificial intelligence, in which little effort was made to avoid enormous numbers of civilian casualties. “The goal was quantity, not quality,” said one of the speakers. According to the sources in the film, the military chose to target members of Hamas, some low-level, at home at night rather than when they were out during the day because it was easier, even though it meant killing their families and neighbors. One man told of hacking into the phone of a 12-year-old girl to learn when her father arrived home, and then ordering a bombing in which she was killed.

But “NAZA” suggests that the system Israel created had mass death built into it. In the frantic days after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, Israel was full of calls to annihilate Gaza, and the murderous rhetoric has persisted. After 50,000 Gazans had already been killed, the former head of Israeli military intelligence said, in leaked audio, “For every one person on Oct. 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn’t matter now if they are children.” In this atmosphere of rage, grief and total self-justification, the Israeli military made a series of choices that ensured Gaza would become a killing field, whatever the specific motives of everyone involved. “When people talk about ‘flattening Gaza,’ what do you mean if not executing people?” asked one of the subjects in “NAZA.”

At one point in the film, as an interviewee explained the rules of engagement, Abraham said, “But if you can kill 20 people per junior member, and there are tens of thousands of members …” To which the man responded, “You end up with all of Gaza, yes.”

Of course, we don’t know who these sources are. They were filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, their faces shadowed, their profiles and voices digitally altered. Journalistically, the use of anonymous sources for explosive allegations isn’t unusual, but it makes some of the documentary’s claims impossible to check. The I.D.F. has emphasized the whistle-blowers’ anonymity in disparaging the film. At the same time, it’s opened a leak investigation to find out whether classified material was used in the production, a strange thing to do if the revelations are false.

“Israel has been in a state of denial now for close to three years,” said the Israeli American historian Omer Bartov, author of the recent book “Israel: What Went Wrong.” Until “NAZA,” he said, there had been little debate in the country about the leveling of Gaza. Now, he said, people are “actually speaking about the issue of what happened in Gaza rather than refusing to speak about it.”

But it’s a conversation many cannot face. “In Israel you may be on the left, but your children go to serve in the army, and often you are proud of them being soldiers,” said Bartov. “And then you’re told they maybe were involved in a criminal war. That’s very difficult for people to accept, and they will find all kinds of ways to resist it.”

It’s hard to tell whether Israelis are enraged by “NAZA” because they think it’s full of lies, or because they know or fear it’s true.