Last week, the documentary film NAZA by the Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor won the prestigious Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, and earning a 25-minute standing ovation to boot. NAZA – the acronym is a an informal IDF term for human “collateral damage”- was produced by the Guardian newspaper, which has described the film in these terms:
Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, NAZA reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
The Venice prize for NAZA has ignited a storm of controversy within Israel, particularly over the film’s allegations about the deliberate mass killing of civilians. At one extreme:
Israel’s Culture Minister Miki Zohar said Sunday he would work to revoke the Israeli citizenship of documentary directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor after their film “NAZA” won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Festival.
On Tuesday, the IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir ordered an investigation of the film to be carried out. Reportedly, the IDF will be seeking the assistance of the security agency Shin Bet in their inquiries, and legal action may be taken against the film-makers.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are not new to this kind of pressure. Previously, they made the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, which vividly portrayed the forced displacement of Palestinian villagers in an area of the West Bank. Like most of the film’s detractors, I haven’t yet seen NAZA. Judging by reports though, the film builds on the ground-breaking work that Abraham did for +972 magazine in 2024, in which he first revealed the nature and extent of the IDF’s use on artificial intelligence for its targeting decisions in Gaza.
The articles written by Abraham about the “Lavender” and “Gospel” AI programmes and the “Where’s Daddy?” automated tracking system can still be found here, and here. My own Werewolf summary in 2024 of Abraham’s trail-blazing work can be found here. As the +972 journalist Sarah Goodfriend reported in April 2024:
In contrast to…20th-century wars, Israel’s assault on Gaza is a fundamentally high-tech killing campaign. Earlier this month, investigative reporting in +972 and Local Call revealed AI’s pivotal role in the bloodshed. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, the military used an AI machine nicknamed “Lavender” to generate tens of thousands of “human targets” for assassination on the grounds that they are allegedly part of the armed wings of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. These outputs were then fed into an automated tracking system known as “Where’s Daddy?” enabling the army to kill each one inside their home, along with their whole family and often many of their neighbours.
These revelations follow an earlier investigation by +972 and Local Call, which shed light on another AI target-generating system known as “Habsora” (“The Gospel”). Whereas Lavender generates human targets, Habsora marks buildings and structures that allegedly serve a military function. One former intelligence officer told +972 that this technology enables the Israeli army to essentially operate a “mass assassination factory.”
Numbering, remembering
Currently, the official death toll of Palestinians killed since October 7,2023 stands at 73,786 according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Reportedly, those figures include some 20,000 children. Another 174, 220 Palestinians have been wounded. A further 10,000 are missing, with many presumed to be buried under the rubble. Three years on, their remains are still being recovered.
On the Israeli side of the conflict, as the British Red Cross has reported “almost 1,200 people were killed in the [Hamas-led] attack on 7 October 2023, with more than 5,400 injured. And over 200 hostages were taken in the attack.”
As of Monday this week, the number of Palestinians reported killed since the “ceasefire” was declared on October 11, 2025 stands at 1,375. In other words, the Palestinian death toll since last October alone now almost equals the number of Israelis killed on, or since, October 7, 2023. Note: these figures are not being cited to minimise the genuine grief and suffering on both sides. Yet since the killing of 1,200 Israelis on October 7 has been widely and justifiably deemed to be an atrocity, what language do we use to describe the toll in human lives taken in response, given that this figure is roughly 60 times larger?
The questions seldom asked in media coverage of Gaza arise from this vast difference between the casualty figures on both sides of the conflict. It is this issue of disproportionality that NAZA reportedly attempts to explain. How come the death toll is so lopsided, what has generated that imbalance, what role has AI technology played in creating this imbalance, and have the subsequent Israeli attacks on Gaza been morally and tactically proportionate to the offensive that Hamas launched on October 7,2023?
Reportedly, the NAZA film – consistent with Abraham’s earlier work for +972 – has grappled with these questions by interviewing some 24 anonymous IDF soldiers and intelligence personnel. As mentioned, the film-makers have been labelled in the Israeli media as “traitors” and “Israel haters,” have been accused by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu of creating a “global antisemitic incitement” and denounced for disseminating a “blood libel” – all this on top of them being threatened with legal action and the stripping away of their Israeli citizenship.
The IDF has denied that it has deliberately targeted civilians. Its response to NAZA has come down to this:
The IDF has…publicly rejected the documentary’s central allegations. The military said that NAZA relied on anonymous testimonies whose identities, military service, positions, and involvement in the events described could not be independently verified. It also challenged claims attributed to junior personnel about strategic decisions that the military said were outside their areas of responsibility.
Almost simultaneously, the Jewish newspaper Haaretz has reported that a group of 14 international law scholars from various Israeli academic institutions are now publicly calling for an “independent probe” into the suspected violations of international law (and possible war crimes) committed during the Gaza war, including via the conduct of senior policy-makers.
The Israeli legal experts also addressed the IDF’s response to the documentary, and the IDF’s dismissal of allegations raised in the film as being unfounded.
The scholars said that, like IDF officers, they had not seen the film, but argued that irrespective of it, the allegations raised throughout the war required an independent and effective investigation into the conduct of the war under international law.
The furore over NAZA rolls on, with a few glimmerings of reasoned debate amidst the fulminating outrage. On Tuesday, even the reliably conservative Jerusalem Post was taking a nuanced line on the allegations of indiscriminate and disproportionate killing in Gaza of Palestinian men, women and children. The newspaper questioned the moral calculus involved in deciding what an acceptable ratio of civilian deaths to Hamas operatives/sympathisers might be in any given mission:
…When does the ratio of terrorists to civilians in a particular attack, and as a matter of policy, violate even the most extreme interpretation of proportionality? Can killing 100 civilians (as claimed by past media reports) or 500 civilians (as claimed by NAZA) be justified to kill even the most senior single terrorist? Can Israel say it is justified to kill 20 civilians “merely” to kill mid-level terrorists?
As the same article continues, the concerns around this issue did not originate with the NAZA film:
Here, the problem is less the film, which makes an amorphous allegation that cannot be checked, but the fact that the IDF never really responded to the seriously researched New York Times and +972 stories which came out with similar allegations nearly two years ago, and more than two years ago. The IDF needs to respond to the AI targeting accusations with much more transparency, both in general and to specific incidents that prior reports raised, which the NAZA films merely dramatized.
To its credit, the NAZA film is finally stoking a debate – however inflamed – within Israel on these matters. While better late than never, this debate does seem to be weirdly belated. Much of the outside world came to its own conclusions about proportionality, indiscriminate civilian killings and probable IDF war crimes quite some time ago.
Footnote One: In Haaretz earlier this week, David Issacharoff provided an interesting summary of the political convergence of interest within Israel on the issues raised by the NAZA film :
Many in the anti-Netanyahu bloc fiercely deny the massacres of Palestinians that have taken place since the October 7 attack. At the same time, many in the pro-Netanyahu bloc are comfortable with them, with its leaders touting in real time the “annihilation” of Gaza. Together, they form a broad mainstream united in rejecting any reckoning with Israel’s actions…
This consensus, largely based on political expedience, Issacharoff indicated, has wider implications for Israel:
Almost three years after October 7, Israelis remain trapped in the trauma and horror of that day, unwilling to confront what their own country has inflicted in response. By crying “distortions” over a film like NAZA, Netanyahu and his rivals actively distort the reality of the conflict that has shaped Israelis’ lives, both before October 7 and ever since. The question now goes well beyond how long a society can deny its own massacre of tens of thousands of innocent people: it is what kind of society that denial leaves behind.
Footnote Two: In interviews conducted since the Venice award last week, Yuval Abraham has paid homage to Palestinian journalists, many of whom have paid with their lives for documenting what has been happening in Gaza:
Abraham said the Israeli intelligence officers interviewed for the documentary described the killing of Palestinians in Gaza as systematic rather than accidental. “And the Israeli intelligence officers we spoke with told us that this mass killing is systemic. Not by accident. But by design,” he said. “Actions of murder and policies that are based on total dehumanization of Palestinians.”
He added that Palestinian journalists had documented events in Gaza from the beginning of the war and accused Israel of silencing their voices. “This truth has been documented and known from the very first day, thanks to Palestinian journalists,” Abraham said. “More than 200 of them were killed by Israel in Gaza. Their voices were silenced and denied. We believe that the denial of a crime is what helps it persist,” he added.