NAZA is an 80-minute documentary film which examines the systems behind Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Its title is derived from Nezek Agavi, the Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage. It was directed by Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and co-produced by the Guardian newspaper.
It premiered in the main competition at the Venice Film Festival on 10 September 2026, where it received a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation and won the Special Jury Prize. It will be available for free on the Guardian website in November after its global theatrical run.
(Abraham and Szor won an Oscar in 2024 for their film No Other Land, which shows the destruction of Masafer Yatta, a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank. It is available on Amazon Prime.)
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In an article on 17 September 2026, entitled “I saw NAZA – in a healthy Israel, it would be shown on the evening news”, Haaretz journalist, Etan Nechin, wrote:
“In NAZA, 24 anonymized Israeli military and intelligence personnel detail the internal machinery and protocols of the targeting systems.
“Based on Abraham’s 2024 exposé (in the +972 magazine), the documentary contains interviews with 24 intelligence officers from the elite Unit 8200 about an AI system called Lavender, used to generate tens of thousands of targets during the Gaza war.
“The interviews were filmed at night on a Tel Aviv rooftop, with the officers’ voices distorted and their faces digitally altered to conceal their identities. As they explain how they helped build Lavender, automating the identification of targets and calculation of expected casualties, the darkness makes it easier to imagine the conditions in which they worked: huddled in dim offices before flickering computer models.
“Using a notepad, the interviewees sketch out how they had detailed information about virtually any building in Gaza. As part of the targeting process, officers could use the system to track residents’ cellphones. One of the officers even describes hacking into the phone of a 12-year-old girl using an automated tracking system called “Where’s Daddy?” allowing them to determine when her father would be home. The building was later bombed while the man and his family were asleep inside.
“Officers were told that Lavender could identify Hamas operatives with 85 percent accuracy, and did so at scale. According to one officer, Lavender “enabled” the killing of tens of thousands of non-combatants and the demolition of whole neighborhoods, all presented as legitimate attacks on military targets.”
Interviewees in the film explained that the AI software assigns an expected civilian fatality value to potential targets. Strikes with a value under 20 (20 NAZA) did not need higher-level special clearance. Approvals were granted for strike values reaching as high as 500 civilian casualties (500 NAZA).
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Needless to say, the directors of NAZA have been subject to fierce criticism from Israeli politicians, most of whom hadn’t seen the film. Prime Minister Netanyahu said: “It’s shocking. We are fighting global anti-Semitic incitement and when it comes from within us it is intolerable” and lamented that “two Israeli directors portraying the [Israeli military] as war criminals receive applause at the Venice festival”. He promised to introduce two bills into the Knesset, one to allow the revocation of citizenship from people who “defame Israeli soldiers” abroad, and another to increase the sum they can be sued for in defamation cases.
Opposition leaders vied with him in their condemnation. Gadi Eisenkot, a former head of the Israeli military, is the most likely successor to Netanyahu if he can’t form a government after the coming election. He denounced the film as demonstrating “moral blindness, a detachment from reality, and harm to the State of Israel in a difficult hour”. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett called it a “horrific blood libel against our sons and daughters”, and former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman described the directors as “haters of Israel”.
At the time of writing, only a handful of Israeli journalists have been able to watch the film in Israel. Israeli cinemas have so far declined to screen it, even for free.
David Morrison
30 September 2026
