24 Israeli military insiders including intelligence officers and soldiers have opened up about the secret systems used for mass killings of Palestinian civilians during the Gaza war in a new documentary film called NAZA.
The film’s title references an Israeli military acronym used as a shorthand for civilian casualties, including men, women and children.
It got a 25-minute standing ovation at Venice premiere was made by Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
The documentary was shot secretly over a period of three years on rooftops in Tel Aviv and the identities of the subjects are hidden by digitally altering their voices and appearances. The subjects in the film speak about the secret methods such as using AI to identify and bomb low-ranking Hamas targets in their homes at night, with the knowledge that it would also kill their families.
The documentary shows how the Israeli military hacked into phones to locate targets and listened to the conversations they had with their wives and children just before they were killed.
The subjects have given first person accounts on how entire neighbourhoods were destroyed, homes burnt and civilians killed at a food distribution site.
The military has acknowledged using artificial intelligence to help identify targets, but maintains no strike is carried out without human involvement. “When it comes to ‘pressing the red button,’ only a person can do it,” said an Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity pending a formal statement from the army.
At a press conference in Venice on Thursday, Abraham said that the officers were told to describe what they did, and how the systems work.
“Some of them did not express remorse and some did. Some spoke out of indifference, some out of pride”, he said.
Many subjects in the film worked in a secret intelligence unit and reported directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. One of them revealed that their mission was to “thwart peace”.
“We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli film-makers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible,” Abraham and Szor said in a statement.
Abraham and Szor were two of the four directors of the 2025 best documentary winner “No Other Land,” the story of Palestinian activists fighting to protect their communities from demolition by the Israeli military. A collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers, it was made between 2019 and 2023, wrapping production days before Hamas launched its deadly October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that started the war in Gaza.
The areas Israel controls in Gaza have been mostly destroyed and depopulated. Most of the territory’s 2 million Palestinians are in areas that remain under Hamas control.
(With inputs from agencies)
