Directed by Oscar-winning filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by The Guardian, the film takes its title from an Israeli military acronym referring to civilians expected to be killed in an attack. It examines how intelligence gathering, automated targeting, and predetermined civilian casualty estimates were incorporated into Israeli military operations in Gaza.

The interviewees included intelligence officers and soldiers directly involved in surveillance and remote targeting. Their identities were concealed, with interviews filmed at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv and participants’ appearances and voices digitally altered.

According to the testimonies, Israeli forces used AI-based systems to identify large numbers of suspected low-ranking Hamas members, who were then targeted in their homes, often at night. Officers said attacks were carried out despite prior knowledge that wives, children, and other family members could also be killed.

The documentary also details the hacking of Palestinians’ phones to track their locations and the covert monitoring of conversations with their relatives shortly before strikes were launched.

Other accounts describe the destruction of neighborhoods even when Israeli forces estimated that up to 25% of residents remained inside their homes, the systematic burning of Palestinian homes, and the killing of civilians at a food distribution site.

The directors said the film seeks to show that the killing of civilians was not simply the result of isolated actions by individual soldiers but was rooted in broader military policies and accepted procedures.

“We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli filmmakers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible,” Abraham and Szor said.

They stressed that the film does not center on “sporadic war crimes committed by rogue soldiers.”

“It is on the orders themselves, the policies, the accepted practices, the language and logic that make those practices possible, and the people who operate within them,” they said. “The system and its cogs.”

Several of those interviewed reportedly worked within a secret intelligence unit reporting directly to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office. One insider said the unit’s mission was to “thwart peace.”

NAZA builds on investigations published between 2023 and 2025 by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian, which previously exposed the use of AI-assisted systems and mass surveillance in Israeli targeting operations.

Paul Lewis, The Guardian’s head of investigations and an executive producer of the film, described the documentary as the culmination of “years of painstaking work to uncover and verify the systems used by Israeli military intelligence in Gaza.”

Venice International Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera described NAZA as “truly groundbreaking” and “a politically disruptive and cinematically extremely interesting work.”

According to Variety, the film received a standing ovation lasting nearly 25 minutes after its screening, setting a record for the length of applause at a major film festival, with some audience members raising Palestinian flags.

The documentary was co-produced by James Wilson and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, part of the team behind the Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest. Abraham and Szor were also among the four directors of No Other Land, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2025.

The filmmakers drew a direct connection between the two projects.

“In the film No Other Land, we spent five years, together with [Palestinian co-directors] Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, documenting the army destroying Palestinian homes in order to paint a larger picture of a system of occupation and ethnic supremacy aimed at the removal of Palestinians from the West Bank,” they said.

“In NAZA, we are similarly connecting the dots of a system, gathering the testimonies of two dozen intelligence officers and soldiers and depicting the military systems used to perpetrate what a UN commission and the world’s leading human rights groups have described as a genocide.”

Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 2023 have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians and wounded over 174,000 others, while the occupation has destroyed or damaged the majority of the Strip’s homes and civilian infrastructure.

Source: Guardian