New documentary examining Israel’s use of artificial intelligence in its military campaign in Gaza has won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival after receiving a record-breaking standing ovation at its premiere.
NAZA, directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, features testimony from 24 Israeli military and intelligence personnel to investigate the AI system behind mass killing of Palestinian civilians.
The 80-minute film examines the use of AI-assisted targeting, mass surveillance and military intelligence. Accepting the award, Abraham said the mass killing of Palestinians was systemic rather than accidental. The directors urged Israelis in particular to watch the documentary.
“It’s our country that is doing these crimes,” Abraham said.
The documentary was filmed in secret at night on rooftops across Tel Aviv. The 24 interviewees include intelligence officers, soldiers and military personnel whose faces and voices were digitally altered to protect their identities. Interviewees describe an environment resembling a killing factory or a lethal video game. One of the AI systems examined in the documentary is known as Lavender, a machine-learning system previously reported on by +972 Magazine and Local Call. According to those investigations, Lavender was used by Israeli military intelligence to process large quantities of surveillance information and generate lists of potential Palestinian targets.
The film’s title refers to the term “Nezek Agavi”, meaning collateral damage, a phrase used within military contexts to describe the number of civilians expected to be killed during an attack.
NAZA follows Abraham and Szor’s 2025 Ocsar winning documentary No Other Land, which documented the displacement of Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank.
The documentary arrives amid mounting international scrutiny of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, where more than 73,500 Palestinians have been killed and around 174,500 wounded since October 2023, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The Israel Defense Forces has categorically rejected the allegations presented in NAZA, questioning whether the anonymous interviewees can be independently verified.
