Gaza Herald— A new documentary built around testimony from 24 former Israeli military and intelligence personnel is shedding new light on the systems, orders, technologies, and targeting practices used during Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip, raising grave questions about the deliberate and systematic nature of civilian harm.
NAZA, directed by Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, premiered Thursday at the Venice International Film Festival, where it is the only documentary among 21 films competing for the prestigious Golden Lion.
Produced by The Guardian and JW Films, the documentary features testimony from Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers involved in surveillance, target selection, and remote attacks in Gaza. The interviewees spoke anonymously, with their faces and voices digitally altered to protect their identities.
Their accounts provide an inside look at a military system that Palestinian families in Gaza have experienced from the other side of the bombing: homes turned into targets, neighborhoods reduced to rubble, families killed together, and civilians exposed to technologies capable of tracking and identifying people before strikes are carried out.
The film’s title is drawn from an Israeli military acronym reportedly used by intelligence personnel to estimate the number of Palestinian civilians expected to be killed in an airstrike, offering a chilling glimpse, according to the testimonies, into how Palestinian civilian lives and deaths could be reduced to figures in operational calculations before an attack was even carried out.
A System Built Around Civilian Harm
The testimonies featured in NAZA challenge descriptions of Palestinian civilian deaths as isolated mistakes, unintended consequences, or individual failures.
According to the former Israeli personnel interviewed for the film, Israeli forces relied on mass surveillance, artificial intelligence, digital tracking, and automated systems to identify Palestinians for targeting, including people suspected of having low-level links to Hamas.
Some individuals were allegedly targeted inside their homes even when Israeli forces knew that family members and other civilians were present.
The documentary also describes Israeli intelligence hacking Palestinians’ phones to locate targets and monitoring private conversations shortly before attacks.
Other testimonies describe the destruction of Palestinian neighborhoods despite assessments that civilians were still inside, the burning of civilian homes, and the killing of Palestinians near a food distribution site.
Taken together, the testimonies presented in the film point to far more than isolated acts on the battlefield. They expose what appears to be a broader system in which military orders, intelligence gathering, targeting policies, advanced technology, and institutional decision-making worked in concert to facilitate the large-scale killing of Palestinian civilians. Rather than being the result of individual decisions alone, the accounts raise serious questions about a system in which the deaths of Palestinians could be anticipated, calculated, and ultimately incorporated into the machinery of war.
“We are similarly connecting the dots of a system,” the filmmakers said, explaining that the documentary examines the orders, policies, accepted practices, and language that shaped Israel’s military campaign.
Inside Israel’s Intelligence Apparatus
Several of the documentary’s interviewees reportedly served in a secret Israeli intelligence unit that reported directly to the prime minister’s office.
One former officer described the unit’s mission as seeking to “thwart peace.”
This testimony exposes the direct pipeline between the highest levels of the Israeli regime and the carnage in Gaza, proving that the systematic slaughter of Palestinians is not an oversight, but a deliberate state policy engineered by political leaders, intelligence agencies, and the military machine working in lockstep.
Speaking in Venice, Abraham explained that the directors confronted Israeli soldiers and intelligence operatives with a simple task: account for their actions and expose the mechanics of the occupation’s war machine. While a few offered belated tears of remorse, others laid bare the profound inhumanity of the system, recounting their role in the devastation of Palestinian lives with chilling indifference and brazen pride.
For Palestinian families who have lived through years of bombardment, displacement, and loss, the significance of these testimonies lies not simply in what individual soldiers say they did, but in what their accounts may reveal about the machinery behind the destruction.
The Technology Behind the Killing
NAZA builds on investigations published by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025 into Israel’s use of artificial intelligence, mass surveillance, and automated targeting systems in Gaza.
The documentary brings together testimony from 24 Israeli military and intelligence insiders to examine how these technologies allegedly operated alongside military orders, intelligence assessments, and targeting decisions.
The filmmakers say they made NAZA out of an obligation, as Israelis, to investigate what they describe as their country’s “mass killing of Palestinian civilians” in Gaza.
This film lays bare the ongoing reality for our people in Gaza, who continue to endure the horrific, calculated devastation of Israel’s genocidal campaign. Over 73,000 Palestinians have been martyred and more than 174,000 wounded, with whole families wiped from the civil registry while the world watches.
Across every corner of the Strip, the occupation has reduced our homes, schools, and hospitals to rubble, forcing families into endless cycles of displacement and subjecting millions to deliberate starvation, untreated wounds, and a total collapse of basic life support.
What the Testimonies Raise Under International Law
The evidence presented in NAZA raises serious concerns under international humanitarian law, particularly regarding the protection of civilians, the principle of distinction, and the requirement that expected civilian harm be proportionate to the anticipated military advantage.
One of the most disturbing issues raised by the documentary is the alleged use of a predetermined civilian casualty figure in operational planning. If civilian deaths were knowingly incorporated into attack calculations before strikes were carried out, that practice would raise serious questions about whether the principle of proportionality was being respected.
The testimonies concerning strikes on homes where entire families were known to be present also raise serious questions regarding the obligation to distinguish between civilians and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives.
The reported use of artificial intelligence and automated targeting systems raises additional concerns over human oversight, target verification, and accountability. Technology does not, by itself, remove the responsibility of commanders or decision-makers for unlawful conduct where the required elements of individual or command responsibility are established.
If independently substantiated, the practices described in the documentary could potentially implicate provisions of the Rome Statute concerning war crimes and crimes against humanity. Any final legal determination, however, rests with competent investigative and judicial bodies based on the full body of available evidence.
From No Other Land to NAZA
For Abraham and Szor, NAZA continues an effort to confront the systems through which Palestinians have experienced dispossession and violence.
The two filmmakers were among the four directors, alongside Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, behind No Other Land, which won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
While No Other Land documented Israeli demolitions and the displacement of Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank, NAZA turns inward, using testimony from Israeli military and intelligence insiders to examine how Palestinians in Gaza were surveilled, selected as targets, and killed.
The central question raised by the film is not simply what happened during individual attacks, but how an entire system of policies, orders, intelligence practices, and technologies could facilitate the killing of civilians on such a massive scale.
For Palestinians, whose families and communities have endured the consequences of those operations, the distinction between an isolated mistake and a system is not an abstract legal question. It is reflected in the homes destroyed, the families buried, the neighborhoods erased, and the lives permanently altered.
A Call for Independent Investigation and Accountability
In light of the testimony and evidence presented in NAZA, the undersigned organizations call upon the international community and competent legal bodies to:
The Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court: Consider the testimonies and evidence presented in NAZA as part of the ongoing investigation into the Situation in the State of Palestine.
The UN Human Rights Council and relevant international bodies: Establish an independent investigation into the use of artificial intelligence, mass surveillance, and algorithmic targeting systems in armed conflict and examine their compliance with international humanitarian law.
States party to the Geneva Conventions: Fulfill their obligations under international law to prevent and respond to grave breaches and to ensure that technologies and security systems transferred for military use are not used to facilitate violations against civilians.
Competent investigative and judicial authorities: Preserve and independently examine testimony, military records, targeting procedures, intelligence assessments, and technological evidence relevant to alleged unlawful attacks against Palestinian civilians and civilian infrastructure.
The testimony gathered in NAZA demands scrutiny beyond individual incidents. It points toward the need to examine the wider machinery of war: who designed the systems, who authorized their use, who set the rules, who knew civilians would be killed, and who bears responsibility when those systems turn Palestinian homes and families into targets.
For Gaza’s civilians, these are not merely questions for a documentary. They are questions of life, death, accountability, and justice.
