The Israeli government is promoting an online film project that mimics the style of NAZA, the award-winning documentary that details Israel’s mass killings of civilians in Gaza, in an attempt to counter the real film’s findings.

The real documentary, directed by the Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and produced by the Guardian, is in cinemas and will be shown in more than 50 countries.

The Israeli government has denounced the film and announced plans to strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship, accusing them of treason.

In recent days, Israeli embassies have been promoting a link to a hastily produced online film entitled NAZA: The Real Story. Mimicking some of the style of the real documentary, including the use of anonymised interviews shot on rooftops in Tel Aviv, it is hosted on a website called nazadocumentary.com.

Ariel Averbuch, an Israeli attorney and army reservist who made the new documentary, described it as an “offensive move” intended to shift the world’s focus from allegations about the Israeli military’s killing of civilians. The film claims that Israel has the “most moral army in the world”.

Another film-maker listed on the website for NAZA: The Real Story is Roi Danino, a candidate for the rightwing Israel First party.

The website domain was registered on 16 September, six days after NAZA’s premiere at the Venice international film festival, where it won the special jury prize after receiving the longest ovation in the festival’s history.

Initially, the website falsely presented itself as a promotional page for NAZA itself, naming Abraham and Szor as the directors, and listing film festivals where the documentary was due to be screened.

“Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of terrorists in Gaza,” it said, distorting the film’s official synopsis by removing the reference to the deaths of Palestinian civilians.

That wording was removed from recent updates of the website, once the video for NAZA: The Real Story had been added to the page.

It now appears as a platform for the rival film, with a counter that implausibly suggests the short film has been watched more than 42m times. (The film’s official YouTube page is listed as having just 30,000 views.)

According to a technical analysis, the discrepancy suggested the viewer counter could have been driven by requests made to the website, by humans or bots, rather than the number of people who actually watched the video. When asked about the source of the 42m claim, Averbuch said he did not know and referred the questions to his tech team.

The Israeli military has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza since the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, in a military campaign that a United Nations commission has described as genocide.

The 24 interviews with Israeli military insiders in the original film NAZA detail how an AI-assisted apparatus of mass surveillance was activated during the Gaza war, revealing the systems that were used to target Hamas operatives in the knowledge large numbers of Palestinian civilians would also die.

The Israeli embassy to the US, which shared the new documentary on its social media, said the ministry of foreign affairs was not involved in producing the film, and that it had intended only to “amplify the message of its creators and expose wider audiences to arguments challenging and dismantling the blood libels and false allegations”.

Related: NAZA film-makers say they spoke to more than 100 sources about Israeli actions in Gaza

The Israeli government said on Thursday that it was awarding the film-makers with a certificate of appreciation “for their contribution to Israeli public diplomacy”, claiming the production had garnered tens of millions of views.

A Guardian spokesperson said: “We are aware that the Israeli government has been promoting a film hosted on a website that initially – and falsely – claimed it was Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary.

“This was a brazen attempt to mislead audiences and distract from the urgent questions raised by NAZA.”

As well as its global cinema releases, NAZA will be available free on the Guardian’s website from late November.

Averbuch is the founder of an organisation that says it conducts “advocacy warfare”, including through the publication of scripts to help influencers criticise Abraham and Szor’s critically acclaimed previous film, No Other Land, which documents the destruction of the Palestinian village Masafer Yatta. The two Palestinian co-directors of No Other Land, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, have been harassed or detained by the Israeli military since the film won an Oscar in 2025.

Israeli government officials have scrambled to discredit NAZA’s content, while far-right activists have threatened to hunt down the directors.

The Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, has said they will use “every tool at our disposal” against the film, while the military has issued a 10-page response to the film, which was based on interviews with more than 100 sources with knowledge of the military systems used in the war.

Within a week of NAZA’s premiere, Israel’s ministry of culture had announced a formal investigation into the documentary, calling for Abraham and Szor to be stripped of their citizenship.

Demonstrators gathered outside the home of Szor’s parents, demanding that the she face the death penalty, and a mural depicting the film-makers through the sights of a gun appeared in the Israeli city of Ashdod.

On Monday, the far-right Israeli activist Mordechai David announced he was fundraising in order to establish a team that would “chase” Abraham. “We’ll find him,” David said in a video posted to Instagram.

Szor and Abraham addressed the backlash to their documentary at a Q&A after its New York premiere. “Our country is doing so much to hide these systems,” Szor told the audience. “It’s not a world that is open even to the Israeli public.”

At the London film festival on Thursday, one of NAZA’s producers, James Wilson, said Israeli politicians’ “hysterical, vituperative, aggressive backlash” to the documentary had not been anticipated by the team behind it.

Wilson said although Abraham and Szor had “anticipated displeasure … there wasn’t an anticipation of the level of aggression leading to these threats and the rabble-rousing aspect”.

He added: “To have made a film, a documentary film and be threatened by the political elites of your home country, with charges of treason and defamation … it’s been very difficult and stressful and horrible and scary for them.

“I try to look at the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the film in the majority of the world.”

Additional reporting by Philip McMahon and Rachel Hall