Review: NAZA

by David Katz

11/09/2026 - VENICE 2026: Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor help reveal the advanced technological methods used to achieve Israel’s genocide against Gaza

With their Venice competition-premiered NAZA, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (half of the team behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land) have made another strong intervention on the discourse surrounding Israel’s war and genocide against Gaza, sharing insights that are a further damning indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and its international supporters. Building upon revelations published in The Guardian (one of the film’s backers), and the Israeli-Palestinian outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call, we hear from 24 IDF Intelligence Corps operatives, interviewed by Abraham under the cover of darkness on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, their identities protected by digital alteration; keeping pace with horrifying explanations of AI-driven remote killing are cautious dives into the soldiers’ psychology, as well as some historical context on Israel’s efforts at nation-building and occupation.

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Whilst these details have been circulated before, this concise, 80-minute film visualises them in an especially powerful way and will amplify the widely accepted case that Israel is committing genocide against Gazan civilians, beyond its pursuit of Hamas. We begin by defining the film’s title: NAZA, standing for Nezek Agavi in Hebrew, refers to the quantity of bystanders murdered as collateral damage, excluding the main Hamas targets. But only by unveiling the mechanisms through which the Intelligence Corps break into Gazan telecommunications, and see real lives and infrastructure as spaces to be neutralised and re-occupied, do we understand how these atrocities can be so efficiently committed; the interviewees often elaborate by sketching diagrams on a scrap of paper, the information so compromising that certain details must be blurred out.

The militants’ phones are the first link in the chain, where activity on a single device can be recognised in others on the network through an AI programme called Lavender; then, the targets are attacked at home, with their family typically all around them, rather than in combat. In some instances, the phones tagged by the system don’t actually belong to the militants, and buildings have been levelled by mistake. It’s sobering to realise these consequences of automation, when deployed for this purpose, with AI-powered warfare beckoning greater and more irreversible damage than we can do unassisted.

Further challenging questions are posed to the Israeli operatives, who saw their grandparents’ generation attempting to process and explain the Nazis’ unrepentant mass murder, with the clarion call of “Never Again” resounding through the world’s Jewish communities. “I still see those Nazis as evil. But what does that mean I am?” one of the interviewees says. The visuals provided by Szor, the primary cinematographer, provide an oblique answer, together with directives from official government statements that “all Gazans are terrorists”. Tel Aviv, over the past few years – bar the occasional rocket alert – looks serene, elegant and safe, yet perhaps it’s the ideal environment to pretend an atrocity isn’t occurring around 45 miles away. With international governments finally imposing sanctions on West Bank settlement-produced goods this week, Israel – with the help of documentaries like NAZA – is being dared not to ignore what it’s perpetuated.

NAZA is a UK production staged by JW Films, in association with Placeholder Films and Unseen Hand, and with backing from The Guardian. mk2 Films handles its international sales.

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