A film documenting Israel’s use of AI-powered systems to target Palestinians in Gaza has received a 25-minute standing ovation at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The 80-minute film, NAZA, was directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who won an Oscar in 2025 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. 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. 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.
Some interviewees spoke about the destruction of civilian homes, disregard for humanitarian law and a “general atmosphere” of “hatred” towards Palestinians. Abraham said he hoped the film would push Western governments to drop their backing for Israel and apply pressure through sanctions. 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 +972 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 2024 Oscar for best international feature. Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed about 73,500 Palestinians and wounded 174,500 since October 2023, 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 23-minute ovation and went on to win Venice’s second prize.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
