Israeli Documentary ‘NAZA’ Exposes ‘System of Killing’ in Gaza From Eyes of Secret Intelligence Unit
The directors of the film—which premiered at the Venice Film Festival—said they “felt the responsibility” to expose insider testimony about Israel’s systematic mass killing of Palestinians.
NAZA co-directors Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham attend the photo call for their documentary at the 83rd International Venice Film Festival, at Venice Lido on September 10, 2026.
(Photo by Stefano Rellandini/AFP via Getty Images)
Brett Wilkins
Sep 10, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
A documentary film that premiered Thursday at the Venice Film Festival offers a rare inside account of Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza, with former members of a secret Israeli intelligence unit describing how they helped transform the mass killing of Palestinian civilians into a routine, bureaucratized affair.
NAZA, directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is based on interviews with 24 Israeli military and intelligence insiders, several of whom served in a secret unit that reported directly to the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“We really are looking at... a system of killing, which is mass killing [and] relies on mass surveillance,” Abraham told reporters in Venice on Thursday. “We felt the responsibility as Israelis to use our position... to bring insider testimony into how the system looks like from the inside... And this is the film that we made.”
Szor said that “a lot of these things are also, it’s important to say... known because they’ve been documented by journalists, Palestinian journalists, in Gaza. It’s footage that has been out there.”
“But I think that we felt that there is still some sort of an importance to take those testimonies and put it in a film in a way that, of course, first of all, it’s different to hear,” she added. “The people who designed and operated those systems talk about it in front of a camera.”
According to the film, one former member bluntly said that the unit’s mission was to “thwart peace.”
However, Abraham and Szor said their purpose was not to expose a handful of rogue soldiers, but to examine the machinery and policies behind the violence.
The documentary’s title refers to an Israeli military acronym used to quantify the civilians expected to be killed in an attack—a chilling bureaucratic shorthand for people often referred to as collateral damage, or, in the so-called “War on Terror” still being waged by the United States 25 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, “bugsplat.”
The film’s sources describe artificial intelligence-assisted targeting, mass surveillance, and the hacking of mobile phones to identify alleged Hamas operatives, sometimes despite the known presence of family members and other civilians.
Israeli forces have operated under loosened rules of engagement that effectively permit the killing of an unlimited number of civilians when targeting even a single low-ranking Hamas member. The Israel Defense Forces utilizes cutting-edge AI technology to select targets at a far faster rate than humans alone could, and destroys them with weapons including 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs—many supplied by the US.
The result has been the killing and wounding of more than 250,000 Palestinians since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. Most of the victims have been civilians, including more than 21,500 children killed and tens of thousands more disabled or wounded.
Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation. Israel is facing an ongoing genocide case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice—also in The Hague—and formally supported by nearly 20 nations.
Abraham and Szor are best known internationally for co-directing with two others the film No Other Land, which chronicled ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the illegally occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers and soldiers. The film won the 2025 Academy Award for best documentary feature.
NAZA—which reportedly received a 25-minute standing ovation at its Venice premiere—is the sole documentary among the films competing for the festival’s famed Golden Lion. It joins a growing body of recent films about the Gaza genocide.
American Doctor, directed by Poh Si Teng, follows US physicians working inside Gaza hospitals amid Israel’s deliberate destruction of the strip’s medical and healthcare systems.
Last year’s The Voice of Hind Rajab offered a harrowing mix of acted scenes and the actual 70-minute audio recording of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl’s desperate final phone call to Palestine Red Crescent Society personnel amid an Israeli massacre of her family as they were trapped in a car under tank fire.
Gaza documentary ‘NAZA’ wows Venice and breaks standing ovation record
'NAZA', the new documentary by 'No Other Land' filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, earned a record-breaking 24.5-minute standing ovation following its premiere – the longest-ever ovation recorded at the Venice Film Festival.
The only documentary selected to this year's Venice Film Festival main competition premiered yesterday and has emerged as a serious Golden Lion contender.
NAZA, the new film from Israeli No Other Land directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, shows “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” according to its official synopsis.
The 80-minute hot-button doc, shot in secrecy at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv during the ongoing Gaza war, features interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers, soldiers and whitleblowers. They discuss how Palestinians are targeted – hence the title of the film, a military acronym used offhandedly by Israeli Military Forces referring to the number of civilians expected to be killed in an airstrike in Gaza. It stands for "Nezek Agavi": collateral damage.
The film builds on reporting between 2023 and 2025 published by the Israeli-Palestinian +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, and The Guardian.
NAZA earned a record-breaking 24.5-minute standing ovation following its premiere – the longest-ever ovation recorded at the festival.
Previously, the record was held by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s Gaza-set The Voice of Hind Rajab, about the death of a 6-year-old girl killed by Israeli military fire while attempting to flee Gaza City with her family. The film, which premiered last year in Venice and was one of Euronews Culture's Best Movies of 2025, elicited a 22-minute standing ovation.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's No Other Land was released in 2024 and followed Israeli settler violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary.
Speaking at a press conference yesterday, Abraham said: “We just told these officers and soldiers, please describe to us what you did. Of course there were other questions that arose but the principal question was a question of detail - sketch it for us, we want to know how it worked. And sometimes just asking the question, you get answers.”
In an interview with Variety, Abraham added: “As Israelis, we found ourselves wanting to use the kind of position that we have - the access that we have to people in our own society who went into the military - to look at that system as it carried out what all human rights organizations are saying is a genocide.”
NAZA is produced by The Guardian, as well as James Wilson and Jonathan Glazer - the Oscar-winning team behind the film The Zone of Interest.
Considering Venice comes to an end tomorrow and the raptuous reaction to NAZA, the question remains: Will it become only the third documentary to win the Golden Lion, following 2013's Sacro GRA and 2022's All The Beauty and the Bloodshed?
NAZA will screen in Spain at San Sebastián International Film Festival on 23 September and then at New York Film Festival on 26 September. As of writing, no official theatrical release date has been announed, but French distribution company MK2 Films is handling world sales rights.
This year's Golden Lion winner will be announced on Saturday 12 September.
Israeli-made film about use of AI for mass killing in Gaza gets record ovation at Venice premiere
A film documenting Israel's use of artificial intelligence to facilitate the mass killing of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip received a record 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday. "NAZA" details the brutal Israeli bombardment of the Palestinian territory through anonymous interviews with two dozen whistleblowers from the Israeli military or intelligence services.
Issued on: 11/09/2026
By: FRANCE 24
A chilling new documentary about Israel's AI-powered mass killing of civilians in Gaza from two Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers received a 25-minute ovation at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday.
The audience clapped continuously for Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor after the screening, an AFP reporter witnessed, setting what is thought to be a new record in Venice after a 23-minute ovation for another film about Gaza last year.
In their film "NAZA", Abraham and Szor used conversations with 24 different Israeli military or intelligence whistleblowers who spoke on condition that their identities be protected.
"We are letting the soldiers and the officers speak about what they did," Abraham told AFP.
"The goal was very simple: we wanted to hear in as much detail as possible, how the systems of killing in Gaza looked like, how they operated."
WATCH MORE Understanding how Israel uses 'Gospel' AI system in Gaza bombings
The 80-minute film left many audience members stunned, with interviewees describing how they felt like they worked in a killing "factory" or a lethal video game.
"NAZA" draws its name from a euphemism used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that are expected to be killed in an air strike.
It was described as an "urgent gut-punch" by film magazine Screen, while The Hollywood Reporter said it inspired "outrage ...indignity as well. Most certainly disgust, on a profound level, for the current Israeli regime".
Israel's bombardment of Gaza has left around 73,500 Palestinians dead and 174,500 wounded since October 2023, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures the United Nations deems reliable.
The pounding of the territory followed an attack on Israel by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, that resulted in the death of 1,219 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
First-person testimony
The men and women featured in "NAZA", with their voices and faces digitally altered, detail an AI-powered system known as "Lavender" that was used to identify people for assassination.
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"It was done on a mass scale, like a factory," one says, filmed like all of them at night on a roof terrace with an eerily quiet Tel Aviv as the background.
"Lavender" uses data from the mass surveillance of Gaza, where the entire telecommunications network is monitored by Israel, to identify targets based on their phone calls, movements and interactions.
"The system's parameters are so complex, it's hard to understand," one interviewee, who said he worked on the system, told the filmmakers.
Others describe the systematic destruction of civilian homes, the disregard for war and humanitarian laws, and a "general atmosphere" of "hatred" towards Palestinians.
"We show in our film a targeting system that is, by design, targeting people in civilian spaces, in their family homes," Abraham told Reuters. "Sometimes it can be 500 NAZA ... destroying entire villages or entire neighbourhoods."
Intelligence officers described an AI-assisted system that identified targets using data gathered from thousands of hacked mobile phones. They said the phrase "daddy's home" picked up on a child's phone would be enough to trigger an air strike.
"It's like a video game because everything is done remotely," one interviewee involved in identifying targets says at one point.
Another describes it as "insanely fun".
The officers also described the killing of civilians in Israeli-designated no-go zones, including near aid distribution centres. The location of the zones was not disclosed to residents, one officer said: "They have to learn with blood."
The United Nations said last year that more than 400 Palestinians were killed while seeking aid. Israel acknowledged civilians had been harmed at distribution centres and said it had amended its rules of engagement.
Gaza films
The result of a nearly three-year investigation, "NAZA" is the only documentary in competition at this year's Venice Film Festival, which wraps up on Saturday.
Ovations can be easily manipulated and are seen as an imperfect measure of a film, but they do give an indication of the impact on festival-goers and critics.
Along with Palestinian peers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, Abraham and Szor won an Oscar in 2025 for their film "No Other Land" about Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank.
Their latest movie has been produced by Britain's Jim Wilson with help from Jonathan Glazer – the team behind Auschwitz-set Oscar winner "The Zone of Interest" – as well as Britain's Guardian newspaper.
The war in Gaza retains broad Israeli public support, but Abraham and Szor said they hoped it would encourage Western nations to drop their backing for Israel and apply pressure through sanctions.
"Those of us inside Israel and Palestine trying to fight for change, need it," Abraham told AFP. "You are weakening the people inside who are supporting human rights and a political solution by refusing to act."
Israel denies deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza, accusing Hamas of hiding among the population of the densely packed and besieged enclave where around two million people lived before the war.
Last year, "The Voice of Hind Rajab", a docu-drama about the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl by Israeli forces, picked up second prize at the festival after receiving a 23-minute standing ovation at its premiere.
Foreign journalists have been prevented from reporting from Gaza since the start of the conflict, except under tightly controlled conditions with the Israeli military.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)
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