NAZA, a documentary by the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on Thursday with a 24.5-minute standing ovation. The film examines Israeli military operations in Gaza through the testimony of 24 anonymised military and intelligence insiders, who describe AI-assisted targeting systems and strikes they say were expected to kill civilians alongside individual targets.
The film is one of 21 works competing for Venice's Golden Lion award and is the only documentary in the competition. The award will be presented on Saturday. Abraham and Szor previously won an Oscar in 2025 for their documentary No Other Land.
NAZA takes its name from an Israel Defence Forces, or IDF, term for expected “collateral casualties”. Its title signals the film's central argument: that calculations over civilian deaths were part of the process described by the people interviewed, rather than an unforeseen consequence of individual attacks.
The documentary was shot clandestinely over a three-year span. It was produced by The Guardian and James Wilson of JW Films, with Jonathan Glazer as executive producer. It develops reporting published between 2023 and 2025 by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian.
A system identified in the film as Lavender drew on Gaza's monitored telecommunications network, including phone calls, movements and interactions, to identify assassination targets. Intelligence officers describe data gathered from thousands of hacked mobile phones being used in this process.
One account says that the phrase “daddy's home”, detected on a child's phone, could allegedly prompt an airstrike. Officers also say they covertly listened to conversations involving targets, their wives and their children, sometimes until shortly before attacks on family homes.
According to the testimony, people identified by AI systems were bombed in their homes at night despite an awareness that family members would be killed. Officers describe approving attacks expected to kill hundreds of civilians for single targets. One officer says the system could produce “500 NAZA...destroying entire villages or entire neighborhoods”.
The accounts extend beyond private homes. Officers describe civilians being killed in IDF-designated no-go zones, including areas near aid distribution centres. One officer said residents were not told where those zones were, saying: “They have to learn with blood”.
The documentary also includes accounts of neighbourhoods being destroyed when the Israeli military estimated that as many as 25 percent of residents remained in their homes. The film presents these accounts as evidence of a pattern in which civilian deaths were anticipated in the planning of operations.
In a joint article for +972 Magazine, Abraham and Szor wrote that the film concluded the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza “was not a 'tragic byproduct' of a war against Hamas… but a premeditated, calculated, and intentional act”. That conclusion is the filmmakers' assessment of the testimony and investigations on which the documentary relies.
The IDF said in a statement that it “categorically rejects” the allegations in NAZA. It said decisions to strike are made by humans only. The Israeli military also criticised the reliance on anonymous testimony, arguing that accounts whose sources are unidentified “cannot be verified”.
The documentary therefore places competing accounts before a major film festival audience: former or serving insiders, whose identities remain undisclosed, describe a system in which surveillance data and casualty assessments shaped strikes; the military rejects their allegations and disputes the basis on which they are made.
The film arrives amid continuing scrutiny of deaths near aid distribution centres. The United Nations said last year that more than 400 Palestinians had been killed while seeking aid. Israel acknowledged that civilians had been harmed at distribution centres and said it had amended its rules of engagement.
For Venice, NAZA is a rare competition entry whose force lies in the collision of investigative reporting, anonymous witness testimony and the moral claims made by modern military technology. Whether it wins the Golden Lion remains unknown. Its premiere has nevertheless brought the allegations, and the Israeli military's rejection of them, into one of cinema's most prominent international forums.
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