Israeli film on Gaza receives 25-minute ovation at Venice premiere

A film documenting Israel’s use of AI-powered systems to target Palestinians in Gaza has received a 25-minute standing ovation at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

The 80-minute film, NAZA, was directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who won an Oscar in 2025 for No Other Land, a documentary on Israeli settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank, made with Palestinian co-directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal.

The result of a nearly three-year investigation, the film is built on testimony from Israeli military and intelligence sources who spoke on the condition that their identities be concealed. Their voices and faces were digitally altered, and they were filmed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops.

“We are letting the soldiers and the officers speak about what they did,” Abraham told the AFP news agency. “The goal was very simple: we wanted to hear, in as much detail as possible, how the systems of killing in Gaza looked, how they operated,” he added.

The film’s title is a Hebrew intelligence euphemism used to indicate the number of civilians expected to be killed in a given air strike. Interviewees describe an AI-assisted system known as “Lavender”, which drew on Gaza’s monitored telecommunications network – phone calls, movements and interactions – to identify assassination targets.

“It was done on a mass scale, like a factory,” one interviewee says in the film, while another involved in identifying targets says the process is “like a video game, because everything is done remotely” and is “insanely fun”.

Some interviewees spoke about the destruction of civilian homes, disregard for humanitarian law and a “general atmosphere” of “hatred” towards Palestinians.

“There can be no denying what intelligence personnel knew”, military sources in the film revealed, adding that they “witnessed with their own eyes and ears that the homes they were ‘incriminating’ were filled with families”.