ISLAMABAD: A documentary built around testimony from 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers has put the machinery of Israel’s war in Gaza under renewed international scrutiny, receiving a 25-minute standing ovation at its Venice Film Festival premiere before winning the festival’s Special Jury Prize.
NAZA, directed by Israeli filmmakers and journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, examines the surveillance, intelligence and targeting systems used during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The film was produced by The Guardian and draws on interviews with Israeli military insiders whose identities and voices have been concealed. The filmmakers say the documentary was developed alongside investigations previously published by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call.
The standing ovation followed the film’s September 10 premiere, with video published by The Guardian showing the audience applauding the filmmakers. Two days later, NAZA received the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival.
Inside Israel’s targeting system
At the center of NAZA are 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers who, according to the filmmakers, describe from inside the system how targets were identified, tracked and selected for attack.
Abraham said the documentary was deliberately designed to examine the military campaign not simply as a series of individual strikes, but as a system.
“In this film, you know, we are talking to 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, and we really are looking at a system, at a system of killing, mass killing which is predicated on, it relies on mass surveillance.”
The Guardian’s account of the film says Israeli intelligence insiders describe an AI-assisted mapping system that used phone signals and other data to recommend buildings in Gaza for attack. The documentary also examines the Israeli military term “NAZA,” used to refer to expected civilian casualties associated with an attack.
The filmmakers say their objective was to obtain detailed testimony from people who had actually operated the systems.
“We just told these officers and soldiers please describe to us what you did, how did the systems look like? And, of course, there were other questions that arose through that but the principal question was a question of detail, ‘sketch it for us. We want to know how it worked.’”
Rachel Szor said the film does not claim that documentation of Gaza’s destruction began with NAZA. Palestinian journalists and others had already documented much of what occurred on the ground.
“A lot of these things are also, it's important to say, are also known because they've been documented by journalists, Palestinian journalists in Gaza, it's footage that has been out there.”
But she said the filmmakers believed there was particular significance in hearing directly from those who developed and operated the systems.
“It's different to hear actually the people who designed and operated those systems talk about it in front of a camera, and sketch it, show it.”
The film’s title refers to an Israeli military acronym used to indicate the expected number of civilian “collateral casualties” in an airstrike, according to Reuters and The Guardian.
Individual strikes to wider policy
That distinction places NAZA within a much wider international debate over whether Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the occupied West Bank can be understood solely through individual battlefield decisions or whether broader military and governmental policies are responsible for the scale of civilian suffering.
The UN human rights office said this month that Israeli forces forcibly displaced the entire Palestinian populations of the Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarm refugee camps during military operations in early 2025 and have continued preventing residents from returning.
The UN report documented civilian deaths, destruction of homes and infrastructure, damage to water and electricity networks and restrictions on humanitarian access.
In Gaza, the UN human rights office said on Sept 4 that 24 Palestinians, including four children, had been killed in Israeli attacks during five days between Aug 28 and Sept 1. It stressed that Israel’s stated pursuit of alleged lawful targets does not remove its obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law.
The UN’s humanitarian office has separately said most of Gaza’s 2.1 million people remain displaced, while ongoing airstrikes and hostilities continue causing civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure. It said most of the population is confined to less than 40% of the territory amid Israeli access restrictions.
The criticism also extends to Israel’s policies in the West Bank. The UN has cited intensified settler violence, Israeli military operations, demolitions, movement restrictions and displacement as factors eroding Palestinian livelihoods and increasing food insecurity.
Netanyahu and the question of accountability
The scrutiny has reached Israel’s political leadership, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, finding reasonable grounds to believe that he bore criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity including murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. The court also found reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu bore criminal responsibility as a civilian superior for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against Gaza’s civilian population.
The ICC’s findings are not convictions. They represent the court’s determination at the warrant stage that the evidentiary threshold for issuing an arrest warrant had been met.
The court specifically said the alleged conduct concerned Israeli government bodies and armed forces operating against civilians in Gaza and involved the relationship between an occupying power and the population of occupied territory.
That legal scrutiny provides a broader context for NAZA, whose testimony focuses on the mechanisms through which attacks were allegedly selected and carried out rather than solely on their aftermath.
System, not just battlefield
Abraham said the filmmakers wanted Israeli insider testimony to confront what he sees as a persistent gap between the scale of documented civilian harm and attempts to deny responsibility for it.
“Part of why we wanted to make this film is because I think that hearing testimonies from officers who themselves, you know, operated these systems of killing, designed can make the denial of the crimes harder.”
He added:
"There is a direct correlation between the silence or between the denial of the crimes and their ability to persist.”
For the filmmakers, the documentary is therefore ultimately about more than technology. It is about how bureaucratic systems, surveillance and remote warfare can create distance between those making decisions and the civilians exposed to their consequences.
Abraham also connected that argument to the broader question of dehumanization, while explicitly rejecting any claim that the Gaza war and the Holocaust are identical.
"It doesn't mean that I'm saying it's the same or it's identical. I don't think it is. I think what we should be saying and what we should be doing is recognising similar patterns of dehumanisation.”
The extraordinary reception in Venice has now given those arguments a global cultural platform. But the significance of NAZA extends beyond the film festival: its testimony arrives alongside continuing UN documentation of civilian harm, displacement and destruction in the occupied Palestinian territory and an ICC case in which Netanyahu remains wanted for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The documentary does not itself determine criminal responsibility. What it does is put Israeli insiders on camera describing systems they say they helped operate — adding another layer to an expanding body of reporting, investigation and international legal scrutiny over how Israel has conducted its war and exercised power over Palestinians under occupation.