World

Al Jazeera Investigation Reveals Fabricated View Counts for Israeli Counter‑Documentary

By Mohamed Alzanin

An Al Jazeera data investigation has uncovered that an Israeli counter‑documentary to the documentary NAZA did not receive the claimed 44 million views. The investigation examined domain registries, web archives, source code and three independent traffic tools, exposing fabricated numbers promoted by official Israeli entities.

The original documentary, NAZA, won the special jury prize at the Venice International Film Festival and received a 25‑minute standing ovation. It is based on testimony from 24 unnamed Israeli military whistleblowers who accuse the army of using AI‑powered targeting systems to kill civilians in Gaza. The film’s title comes from the Israeli military term for expected civilian casualties in air strikes.

After NAZA premiered, Israeli officials reacted strongly. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded investigations into the film’s participants and threatened to revoke the citizenship of directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. The film’s success sparked a political storm in Israel.

In response, opponents created a counter‑film. On 16 September, the domain nazadocumentary.com was registered via Cloudflare with the owner’s details hidden. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows the site initially presented itself as the official NAZA website, listing the directors and screening information, but describing the film as exposing the systems behind the calculated mass killing of terrorists in Gaza. By 30 September, the page had disappeared and a new title, “NAZA: The Real Story”, appeared.

The counter‑film, 49 minutes long, was produced by Ariel Averbuch, Roy Danino and Hagai Gutman, who said it was self‑funded. Two additional domains, whatisnaza.com and watchnaza.com, were later registered to redirect users to the counter‑film.

By the morning of 14 October, the nazadocumentary.com website displayed 43,758,421 views, without explaining how the number was calculated. The full 49‑minute version on its official YouTube channel had not exceeded 130,000 views by that date, meaning the website’s counter showed roughly 336 times the actual viewership. The YouTube channel had fewer than 2,000 subscribers, and the film’s X account had only 170 followers.

Independent traffic analysis platforms confirmed the discrepancy. Semrush, a U.S.‑based platform, estimated about half a million visits to the site by 8 October. Similarweb, an Israeli‑based company, estimated only 326 visits for September. The film’s domains were not listed on the Tranco list of the world’s top one million visited domains.

Source‑code analysis revealed that the element displaying the large number was internally tagged as “visitors” but shown to users as “views”. The number is delivered directly from the site’s server, making its calculation method invisible externally. When the page loads, the counter starts at 97 % of its value and counts up for three seconds, creating the illusion of a live counter. The site also 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 unclear whether the counter is based on this data.

Despite the fabricated metrics, official Israeli accounts promoted the counter‑film. The Israeli Embassy in Washington promoted it on social media on 3 October. 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, turning an unsupported, fabricated number into an official talking point.

The digital campaign unfolds against the backdrop of Israel’s 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.