Naza: An Israeli Documentary Confronting Systematic Killings in Gaza

The useful part

Naza Is One of the Most Important Films of Our Time Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. In other words, the information has been out there for months, and much of the world has shrugged, if not ignored it completely. Perhaps it will be hard to ignore now, with the appearance of this starkly shot, damning documentary, which was a very late and out-of-the-blue addition to the Venice and New York Film Festival lineups.

How it works

• Officers talk about using predictive artificial intelligence to determine who might be a Hamas operative, based on similar patterns of behavior, and then repeatedly killing innocent people.
• "Everything was done remotely." (In training, they were shown the Aaron Paul and Helen Mirren vehicle Eye in the Sky.) One guy, incredibly, tells Abraham there are all sorts of other things he can't talk about.
• We see distant nocturnal glimpses of open windows and curtains, revealing ordinary citizens in their kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms, quietly cooking or studying or doing yoga or watching TV.
• They know who lives where, on which floor, in which room, and with how many people.
• One subject says he'd bomb little boys and then watch as dogs fed on their bodies.

What to take from it

Abraham and Szor were the Israeli members of the four-person team that directed 2024's Oscar-winning No Other Land. Many of these men and women designed and operated the systems Israel used to pick targets. The term "NAZA" refers to the number of civilians that might be killed as collateral damage in a strike on a specific target.

Example or evidence

• One officer recalls blowing up a building with 500 people in it to go after one target.
• The modern cityscape of Tel Aviv, with its gleaming skyscrapers, its huge and well-lit residential buildings, looms over the picture, both as a haunting background and as telling cutaways.
• One interviewee recalls looking around the once-prosperous Rimal neighborhood of Gaza, which he says reminded him of Tel Aviv, with its glass towers.
• Naza, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's unflinching expose of systematic Israeli war crimes in Gaza, is a title at the end noting that many of the revelations in the film were previously published in the...

Details worth keeping

At the picture's Thursday press conference in Venice, not long before the film received what might be the longest-ever standing ovation in film-festival history, Szor also reminded everyone that Palestinian journalists have reported on these facts. They say they made Naza "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." The film's setup is disarmingly simple. In a series of interviews, Abraham sits atop the rooftops of Tel Aviv with 24 different Israeli intelligence officers, their faces obscured by night and their voices modified to preserve their identities, as they tell him what they did.

Related coverage

• Aljazeera: A 25-minute standing ovation at the Biennale has put NAZA, an Israeli-made film confronting Israel's genocide in Gaza.
• Deadline: Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's NAZA has landed a sensational 25-minute ovation following its world premiere screening this evening at the Venice Film Festival.
• Screendaily: Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's wrenching Venice competition film is executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer
• Vulture: The documentary received 25 minutes of applause and Palestinian flag-waving.
• Indiewire: Rooftop interviews in Tel Aviv play host to monstrous revelations about AI-assisted massacres.