作者： admin

A wave of fierce public and political backlash has swept across Israel this week, centered on two Israeli filmmakers whose documentary examining alleged war crimes in the country’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza won major international recognition. Dozens of far-right Israeli demonstrators assembled outside the family home of co-director Rachel Szor on Wednesday, issuing violent calls for her execution over the content of the film *NAZA*.

The controversy ignited after Szor and her creative partner Yuval Abraham, both Oscar-winning filmmakers, took home the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival this past Saturday for their work. Since the award announcement, the pair has faced escalating condemnation and threats from across Israeli political and public life.

Israeli daily *Haaretz* documented that multiple protesters gathered outside Szor’s home chanted demands for “the death penalty for traitors.” One demonstrator went even further, calling for not only the two filmmakers to be put to death upon their return to Israel but also for Szor’s family to be expelled from the country and their home permanently sealed. A far-right activist with confirmed close ties to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir urged members of the crowd to publicly identify the filmmakers if they encountered them in any public space, insisting the pair should not be allowed to gather in any public venue such as restaurants. “Whoever sees them should circulate their location across all social and community groups — these scums have nowhere to run,” the activist stated.

Multiple right-wing outlets, including Walla, captured additional hostile remarks from attendees. “This is an act of treason from within,” one protester told the outlet. Photos from the protest show demonstrators holding signs labeling the pair “traitors” and waving flags of Israeli army combat units. One far-right attendee framed the controversy as a unifying cause for all of Israeli society, regardless of political alignment, saying “This is not a matter of right or left” and that all Israelis “need to denounce” the filmmakers. Other protesters vowed to keep organizing demonstrations until the entire country rejects the documentary’s claims, which they dismissed as “blood libels” against Israeli service members.

*NAZA*, the documentary at the center of the conflict, investigates the artificial intelligence targeting systems the Israeli military uses in its Gaza campaign and explores allegations that military planners explicitly factored high volumes of Palestinian civilian casualties into their targeting strategies. To build the film’s narrative, the directors conducted on-the-record interviews with 24 anonymous current and former Israeli military and intelligence insiders who shared firsthand insight into military targeting practices.

The backlash against the film and its creators has expanded far beyond far-right street protesters, with mainstream politicians, leading journalists, and senior public figures uniformly lining up to condemn the pair and challenge the film’s core claims. A public opinion poll published by Israel’s Channel 13 News on Wednesday underscores the depth of public rejection of the documentary’s claims: 68 percent of surveyed Israeli adults said they do not accept the film’s allegations of intentional mass civilian killing in Gaza, while only 13 percent said they find the claims credible. On the question of whether the film should be banned from public screening in Israel, 48 percent of respondents supported a ban compared to 32 percent who opposed restrictions on screening.

In the days following the Venice Film Festival award, senior Israeli political leaders have doubled down on public attacks, even proposing legislative and legal action against the filmmakers. As early as Sunday, Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar called *NAZA* “despicable” and announced he would move immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of the two creators on charges of treason against the state. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined Zohar in condemning the pair, revealing he would introduce two new pieces of legislation targeting anyone found to “defame” the Israeli military. The first bill would codify the revocation of citizenship for anyone convicted of defaming Israeli soldiers, while the second would increase potential civil defamation damages against such individuals by 20 times. “They have no place among us,” Netanyahu said of anyone who defames the country’s military.

Even before reviewing the film’s content, the Israeli military has formally rejected all of its allegations. Israeli media reports confirm that IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir has ordered the military’s legal corps, working in partnership with Israel’s domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet, to pursue legal action against Szor and Abraham.

Prominent Israeli journalists have also joined the condemnation, with many questioning the film’s journalistic credibility and attacking the directors. Michael Shemesh, a political correspondent for the left-leaning Channel 13 News, wrote Tuesday that “One good thing came out of the film *NAZA*: There is a price for defamation,” and praised what he called cross-ideological Israeli unity in rejecting the film. Amit Segal, one of Israel’s most high-profile journalists with Channel 12 News, drew widespread attention Tuesday when he compared *NAZA* to Adolf Hitler’s antisemitic manifesto *Mein Kampf*. After the Union of Journalists in Israel — the country’s largest journalists’ organization — issued a formal statement condemning the threats and attacks against Szor and Abraham, Segal dismissed the union as “a supporter of Hamas’s propaganda ministry,” implying the filmmakers were operating on behalf of the Palestinian armed group.

Not all official voices have backed the backlash, however. A report published by Channel 12 News noted that senior military and diplomatic officials have expressed discomfort with the coordinated attacks on the filmmakers, warning that the aggressive crackdown risks framing Israel globally as a state that does not tolerate freedom of expression. These unnamed officials also accused Netanyahu of exploiting the controversy surrounding the documentary for domestic political gain. “Israel is trapped between what is right for it internationally and what is right for politicians electorally,” the officials told the outlet.

The death of a 21-year-old Palestinian man held without charge or trial in an Israeli prison has thrown a harsh spotlight on longstanding allegations of abuse and neglect inside Israeli detention facilities, leaving his family shattered and demanding full accountability.

Moataz Nizam al-Atrash, a native of Hebron and the youngest of six siblings, died earlier this week at Israel’s Ofer Prison, the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs confirmed in an official announcement Wednesday. At the time of his death, al-Atrash had spent nearly 12 months in administrative detention – a controversial Israeli policy that allows authorities to hold individuals indefinitely based on sealed evidence labeled a ‘secret file,’ with no formal charges or public trial. Official legal documentation confirms al-Atrash had no pre-existing chronic health conditions prior to his October 2025 arrest at his family home.

For al-Atrash’s family, the sudden loss has been compounded by a total lack of transparency from Israeli officials. His older brother Basil al-Atrash shared that the family has been left reeling in shock, with no clear explanation for how the young man died. The last contact with al-Atrash via legal representation came two months before his death, in a five-minute meeting where he reported being in good health, passed along well wishes to his family, and showed no visible signs of illness. A former detainee released from Ofer just two days before al-Atrash’s death also confirmed to the family that he appeared healthy during their time incarcerated together.

‘Israel’s occupation forces called my father in yesterday, and an officer simply told him his son had died in prison. They gave no cause of death, no mention of any health problems,’ Basil al-Atrash told reporters from Middle East Eye in an interview. He added that Israeli officials asked his father to sign a consent form for an autopsy, and the family is currently awaiting official results. Beyond the uncertainty over the cause of death, the family says it harbors deep fears that Israeli authorities will choose to withhold al-Atrash’s remains – a common practice documented by Palestinian prisoner advocacy groups in dozens of past cases.

The family had been preparing to welcome al-Atrash home just days before his death. After his initial six-month administrative detention order was issued following his arrest, the order was renewed for a second term that was set to expire on October 3. ‘We were counting down the days to the end of this second renewal, hoping for his release and getting ready to welcome him home,’ Basil al-Atrash said. ‘Instead, we got the devastating news that he would never come back.’ Before his arrest, al-Atrash worked at a local pastry factory, where he was saving to build a future for himself. His 2025 arrest marked his first run-in with Israeli detention, a detention that ultimately proved fatal.

Leading Palestinian prisoner rights organizations have labeled al-Atrash’s death as part of what they call a deliberate ‘policy of extermination’ targeting Palestinian detainees held in Israeli custody. According to joint data collected by the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, al-Atrash’s death brings the total number of verified Palestinian detainee deaths in Israeli prisons to 92 since October 2023. Of those 92 deaths, 53 were detainees from the Gaza Strip. The organizations warn that the 92 figure only includes deaths where the identity of the detainee has been fully confirmed, and the actual death toll is likely far higher.

Dozens of additional Palestinian detainees are currently considered forcibly disappeared, with no independent or reliable information available about their location or physical condition. In a joint statement released after al-Atrash’s death, the groups noted that ‘Israeli prisons are currently experiencing one of the bloodiest periods for Palestinian detainees since 1967.’ Cumulative data collected by the organizations puts the total number of Palestinian detainee deaths in Israeli custody since 1967 at 329.

The advocacy groups attribute the sharp recent rise in detainee deaths to widespread, systematic abuse inside Israeli facilities. They cite a pattern of torture, severe starvation, deliberate medical neglect, physical violence, sexual assault, systemic humiliation, and the routine denial of basic human rights to detainees. The statement added that the fates of hundreds of Gaza detainees remain unknown due to widespread enforced disappearance, and that accumulating witness testimony and evidence confirms dozens of detainees have been subjected to extrajudicial field executions.

As of early September 2025, Palestinian prisoner advocacy groups estimate that roughly 9,350 Palestinians are currently being held in Israeli jails. This official count includes 90 women and more than 350 minor detainees, most held at Megiddo and Ofer prisons. Approximately 3,176 of those detainees are held under administrative detention, the same policy that kept al-Atrash imprisoned without charge. An additional 1,393 detainees have been classified by Israeli authorities as ‘unlawful combatants,’ a designation that also allows for indefinite detention without formal charges or trial. The organizations note that their current count does not include the full number of Gaza detainees held in Israeli military camps under the unlawful combatant classification, nor does it include Arab detainees from Lebanon and Syria held in Israeli custody.

Widely described as a “state within a state”, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) stands as one of the most influential and heavily scrutinized military-political organizations in the Middle East, anchoring Iran’s Islamic establishment for more than four decades while emerging as a central target of pressure from the United States, Israel and Western allies. This deep dive examines the corps’ foundational origins, sprawling institutional structure, pervasive domestic influence, regional geopolitical role, and its current position amid ongoing external targeting and international sanctions.

Founded in March 1979, just one month after conservative militias toppled the Western-backed monarchy of Shah Reza Pahlavi, the IRGC was created with two core missions: to safeguard the newly established Islamic revolutionary order and to act as a check on Iran’s traditional national army, the Artesh, which retained deep ties to the deposed shah and was widely suspected of plotting a counter-revolutionary coup. Known locally as the Pasdaran, or “guardians”, the organization was structured as a parallel military force separate from the official Artesh, which today counts roughly 600,000 active troops. From its earliest days, the IRGC moved to sideline leftist factions that had joined the anti-shah uprising, viewing these groups as ideologically incompatible and too closely aligned with the Soviet Union.

Today, the IRGC operates five distinct branches: a ground force, an air division, a navy, the elite overseas Quds Force (translated as “Jerusalem Force”), and the Basij, a large volunteer paramilitary network. Current estimates place the corps’ active-duty personnel at more than 150,000, while Basij part-time reserve volunteers number anywhere between 100,000 and one million. Beyond conventional military duties, the IRGC holds exclusive control over Iran’s ballistic missile program—weapons it has deployed against Israeli targets—and is tasked with protecting the country’s border infrastructure and nuclear facilities.

Unlike Iran’s elected government institutions, the IRGC is an unelected body that operates directly under the authority of Iran’s supreme leader, currently Mojtaba Khamenei. Its influence extends far beyond the military sphere, penetrating nearly every aspect of Iranian domestic life, from commerce and governance to education and sports. Thousands of IRGC veterans occupy senior positions in the cabinet, parliament, and state agencies, giving the corps effective veto power over political appointments and private business ventures. Through the Basij network, plainclothes volunteers are embedded in neighborhoods, schools and universities to enforce conservative religious social norms, leading critics to label the Basij a state-sanctioned “morality police”. The network has also played a central role in cracking down on political dissent, crushing major public protest movements including the 1999 student protests, the 2009 Green Movement, and ongoing 2024–2025 demonstrations, which human rights groups say have left thousands of civilian protesters dead. Despite this repressive role, the IRGC maintains some domestic support through its provision of social services, including disaster response and job creation in impoverished rural regions.

As a major economic actor, the IRGC controls hundreds of state-owned contracts, a portfolio that expanded dramatically during the 2005–2013 presidency of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The organization has built near-monopolies across key Iranian industries, and analysts estimate it captures roughly 50% of all revenue from Iran’s critical oil sector. Thomas Juneau, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, notes that these vast business holdings allow the IRGC to cement its hold on power. “The corps’ business interests allow the IRGC and its sympathisers to themselves profit, to have access to pots of cash with which they can buy off the loyalty of others, and to marginalise competing business interests,” Juneau explained to Middle East Eye. “In that sense, the IRGC has both a vested interest in the survival of the Islamic Republic and its web of cronyism, as well as the means to protect its survival.”

The IRGC’s most consequential international role is its leadership of what Tehran calls the “Axis of Resistance”, a regional network of armed and political groups opposed to Israeli, U.S. and Saudi influence in the Middle East. Through its Quds Force overseas wing, the IRGC provides funding, training and weapons to a coalition that includes Hamas in occupied Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, factions of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, and the Houthi movement (Ansar Allah) in Yemen. Support for the Palestinian cause has long been a core ideological pillar of the IRGC, and each member of the network has launched sustained military action against Israeli and Western targets: Hamas carried out the October 7, 2023 attacks that sparked the ongoing Gaza war, Hezbollah has maintained a low-intensity conflict with Israel along the Lebanon border since the 1980s, and the Houthis have launched drone strikes on Israeli territory and blockaded commercial shipping in the Red Sea. It is important to note that each group retains a degree of operational independence from Tehran; Iran publicly denied any advance knowledge of the October 7 attacks, a conclusion that U.S. intelligence agencies have corroborated.

The IRGC also provided critical military and political support to Bashar al-Assad’s government throughout Syria’s 13-year civil war, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions more. For decades, Assad-controlled Syria served as a key supply route for IRGC weapons bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon, a link that was broken when Assad’s government fell in December 2024.

The IRGC’s institutional identity and modern worldview were deeply shaped by the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War, one of the deadliest conflicts of the late 20th century. Just months after the revolution, the IRGC led Iran’s response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion, with tens of thousands of young, minimally trained volunteers deployed to frontline battles where chemical weapons and widespread minefields left massive casualties. Sina Azodi, an assistant professor of Middle East politics at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, calls the conflict a turning point in the corps’ development. “The current Iranian political leadership were the volunteers of the Iran-Iraq war who with very basic training went to the front lines with nothing more than assault rifles,” Azodi notes. He adds that the widespread international support for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the conflict left a lasting collective trauma that defines the IRGC’s outlook today: “Their mindset is shaped by those traumas and the need for Iran to be able to stand on its own feet to defend the country.”

After the war ended in 1988, the IRGC took the lead on national reconstruction, growing steadily in power and influence under the long tenure of former supreme leader Ali Khamenei. It expanded its independent intelligence branch, which now operates as a rival to Iran’s official Ministry of Intelligence. Much of the IRGC’s transregional network was built by Qassem Soleimani, the charismatic Quds Force commander who led the wing from 1998 until his assassination in a U.S. drone strike in 2020. At the time of his death, Soleimani was widely regarded as the second most powerful figure in Iran, behind only the supreme leader. His killing triggered massive outrage across Iran, and just five days later, the IRGC accidentally shot down a Ukrainian commercial passenger plane departing Tehran’s main airport, killing all 176 people on board. The organization later issued a public apology, admitting it had misidentified the civilian aircraft as an enemy military plane.

For decades, the IRGC has been labeled an adversary by most Western governments and many Arab states in the region, and it has been subject to sweeping international sanctions. In recent years, more than two dozen countries have gone beyond sanctions to formally designate the entire IRGC as a terrorist organization, a designation that criminalizes any form of trade, communication or public support for the corps and its affiliates. The U.S. first proscribed the Quds Force as a terrorist entity in 2007, and extended the designation to the entire IRGC in 2019 under then-President Donald Trump. That move faced private pushback from some Pentagon and CIA officials, who noted that designating an official arm of another sovereign government as a terrorist group is unprecedented in diplomatic practice. The Biden administration reportedly considered reversing the designation, though it ultimately did not act. Following the U.S. lead, Canada proscribed the IRGC in 2024, and the European Union added the corps to its terrorist list in January 2026 after documented mass killings of anti-government protesters in Iran. The United Kingdom followed with its own designation in July 2026, pressured by years of lobbying from pro-Israel groups and Iranian diaspora activists, and after a series of attacks on Jewish communities in London that the UK government linked to the IRGC. In total, 23 countries outside the EU’s 27 member states have designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization, including Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine.

Even for countries that have not imposed formal sanctions or designations, U.S. secondary sanctions—which penalize any foreign company that does business with IRGC affiliates—have effectively isolated the organization from most of the global economy. In response, the IRGC has deepened economic and military ties with other states that are also cut off from the U.S.-dominated international financial system or powerful enough to resist U.S. retaliatory pressure. The IRGC has supplied large quantities of drones and missiles to Russia for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sold jet fuel to Myanmar’s military junta during that country’s ongoing civil war, and ships most of Iran’s crude oil exports to China via a shadow fleet of unregistered tankers designed to evade U.S. sanctions controls.

In recent years, the IRGC has suffered heavy losses from repeated assassinations of top commanders by U.S. and Israeli forces. However, analysts note that the organization has maintained its operational capacity due to longstanding contingency succession planning. All senior IRGC positions, including the commander-in-chief role, are directly appointed by the supreme leader. After Israel killed former commander-in-chief Mohammed Pakpour in March 2025, and his predecessor Hossein Salami in an Israeli airstrike during the June 2025 cross-border war, former Iranian defense minister Ahmad Vahidi was appointed to fill the role. Esmail Qaani has led the Quds Force since Soleimani’s 2020 assassination, while Hossein Taeb, a former IRGC intelligence chief, now heads the Basij after Israel killed Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani in March 2025. Other senior IRGC figures killed by Israel in 2025 include IRGC Navy commander Alireza Tangsiri and intelligence wing head Majid Khademi. Israeli airstrikes have even targeted moderate Iranian political figures with ties to the IRGC, including former Security Council head Ali Larijani, who was assassinated in March 2025. The role is now held by Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a longstanding IRGC hardliner.

Juneau argues that while the IRGC has sustained significant damage from repeated U.S. and Israeli strikes, it remains far from defeated. “On the one hand, the IRGC has been badly hit by the US and Israel during the war, as have other pillars of the Islamic Republic,” he says. “If we simply count strikes, military installations damaged or destroyed, ships or aircraft damaged or destroyed, then we can conclude that the IRGC has been significantly weakened.” But he adds that the organization spent decades preparing for this kind of coordinated pressure: “The US and Israel have destroyed an important proportion of the IRGC’s missiles and drones, but the force still has more than enough to continue threatening shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.”

For that reason, Juneau notes that hardline factions within the IRGC see no need for political compromise or a negotiated end to ongoing regional tensions, and remain committed to expanding their influence. “The way out of the war to the IRGC is to consolidate and institutionalise its geopolitical gains,” he says. “It wants, in particular, to see a new arrangement in the Persian Gulf whereby it can de facto veto maritime traffic.”