Venice Film Festival honours NAZA, an expose on Israel’s use of AI systems in Gaza, with a lengthy standing ovation.
A film documenting Israel’s use of AI-powered systems to target Palestinians in Gaza has received a ۲۵-minute standing ovation at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
The ۸۰-minute film, NAZA, was directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who won an Oscar in ۲۰۲۵ for No Other Land, a documentary on Israeli settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank, made with Palestinian co-directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal.
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The result of a nearly three-year investigation, the film is built on testimony from Israeli military and intelligence sources who spoke on the condition that their identities be concealed. Their voices and faces were digitally altered, and they were filmed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops.
“We are letting the soldiers and the officers speak about what they did,” Abraham told the AFP news agency. “The goal was very simple: we wanted to hear, in as much detail as possible, how the systems of killing in Gaza looked, how they operated,” he added.
The film’s title is a Hebrew intelligence euphemism used to indicate the number of civilians expected to be killed in a given air strike. Interviewees describe an AI-assisted system known as “Lavender”, which drew on Gaza’s monitored telecommunications network – phone calls, movements and interactions – to identify assassination targets.
“It was done on a mass scale, like a factory,” one interviewee says in the film, while another involved in identifying targets says the process is “like a video game, because everything is done remotely” and is “insanely fun”.
Some interviewees spoke about the destruction of civilian homes, disregard for humanitarian law and a “general atmosphere” of “hatred” towards Palestinians.
“There can be no denying what intelligence personnel knew”, military sources in the film revealed, adding that they “witnessed with their own eyes and ears that the homes they were ‘incriminating’ were filled with families”.
Abraham said he hoped the film would push Western governments 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. You are weakening the people inside who are supporting human rights and a political solution by refusing to act,” he told AFP, referring to Israel’s backers.
Writing jointly in +۹۷۲ Magazine, Abraham and Szor said the film concluded that the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza “was not a ‘tragic byproduct’ of a war against Hamas… but a premeditated, calculated, and intentional act”.
Screen International, a UK-based trade publication covering the global film industry, described the film as an “urgent, gut-punch”, while The Hollywood Reporter said it inspired “outrage… indignity as well. Most certainly disgust, on a profound level, for the current Israeli regime”.
The film was produced by the UK’s Jim Wilson with The Guardian, with executive producer Jonathan Glazer – the team behind The Zone of Interest, which won the ۲۰۲۴ Oscar for best international feature.
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed about ۷۳,۵۰۰ Palestinians and wounded ۱۷۴,۵۰۰ since October ۲۰۲۳, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Foreign journalists have been barred from entering Gaza except under tightly controlled conditions with the Israeli military.
NAZA is the only documentary in competition at this year’s festival, which concludes on Saturday, and follows last year’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, which received a ۲۳-minute ovation and went on to win Venice’s second prize.
