Israeli documentary on AI-assisted Gaza targeting receives 25-minute ovation at Venice

At the Venice Film Festival this week, an 80-minute documentary about how Israel used artificial intelligence to select and strike targets in Gaza drew a standing ovation that lasted 25 minutes. The film, titled NAZA—a Hebrew military term for the estimated civilian death toll in a single airstrike—premiered to an audience that included industry professionals, journalists, and festival attendees who remained on their feet as the credits rolled.

The directors are Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, Israeli filmmakers who won an Academy Award last year for No Other Land, a documentary about Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank made alongside Palestinian co-directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. For NAZA, they spent nearly three years conducting interviews with Israeli military officers and intelligence analysts who agreed to speak only if their identities were protected. The filmmakers digitally altered their voices and faces, and filmed many of them at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv.

The film's central subject is an AI-assisted targeting system called Lavender. According to the testimony captured on screen, Lavender drew on Gaza's monitored phone networks—tracking calls, movements, and social connections—to identify people for assassination. One person interviewed describes the operation as industrial in scale: "It was done on a mass scale, like a factory." Another, involved in the targeting process itself, compares it to remote work with a disturbing casualness, saying the job felt "like a video game" and was "insanely fun."

What emerges from these accounts is a portrait of deliberate harm. The military sources acknowledge that they knew the homes they were marking for strikes contained families. Some speak of a pervasive atmosphere of hatred toward Palestinians. In a written statement published in +972 Magazine, Abraham and Szor concluded that the killing of Palestinian civilians "was not a 'tragic byproduct' of a war against Hamas… but a premeditated, calculated, and intentional act."

The scale of death is staggering. According to Gaza's Ministry of Health, approximately 73,500 Palestinians have been killed and 174,500 wounded since October 2023. Foreign journalists have been largely barred from entering Gaza to independently verify conditions on the ground, making documentaries like this one a rare window into how the targeting decisions were made and justified by those who made them.

The film's reception at Venice signals its reach. Trade publications covering the film industry called it an "urgent, gut-punch" and noted it provoked "outrage" and "disgust" at what it documents about the current Israeli government. NAZA is the only documentary in competition at this year's festival, which concludes on Saturday. It follows last year's The Voice of Hind Rajab, which received a 23-minute standing ovation and won the festival's second-place prize.

Abraham told the AFP news agency that his goal was straightforward: to let the people who built and operated these systems describe their work in detail. He said he hopes the film will move Western governments to withdraw their support for Israel through sanctions. "Those of us inside Israel and Palestine trying to fight for change need it," he said, arguing that Western inaction weakens the voices within Israel calling for human rights and political solutions.

The film was produced by Jim Wilson, a UK-based producer, in partnership with The Guardian. Jonathan Glazer served as executive producer—the same team behind The Zone of Interest, which won the 2024 Oscar for best international feature. That pedigree, combined with the Venice premiere and the audience response, suggests NAZA will reach far beyond the festival circuit.