A documentary that interrogates the secret machinery behind Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza has premiered at the Venice Film Festival, earning a standing ovation that reportedly lasted nearly 25 minutes and broke records at the festival and beyond. NAZA, directed by Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian, features testimony from 24 Israeli military and intelligence insiders who describe, in explicit detail, the surveillance networks, artificial intelligence systems, and operational policies used to target and kill civilians during the war.
The film appeared as the only documentary in competition for the prestigious Golden Lion award, a testament to its cinematic ambition and the extraordinary nature of its subject matter. It arrives at a moment when the international community is grappling with the scale of destruction in Gaza and the legal and moral questions surrounding Israel’s military campaign.
Voices From the Shadows
The centrepiece of NAZA is the testimony of serving and former Israeli military personnel who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, their faces and voices digitally altered to protect them. They were filmed at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv, in secretive sessions that carried enormous personal risk.
Their accounts paint a picture of a military apparatus designed, from the top down, to maximise civilian casualties while disguising the intent behind each strike. Interviewees describe artificial intelligence systems constructed to identify large numbers of potential low-ranking Hamas operatives, who were then bombed inside their homes after dark — with the foreknowledge that their families would also die. The Israeli military, the insiders reveal, hacked into mobile phones to pinpoint targets’ locations and covertly monitored conversations with wives and children in the hours before each attack.
One interviewee described working within a clandestine intelligence unit that reported directly to the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That individual said the unit’s mission was, in their own words, to “thwart peace.”
Other testimony covers the methodical destruction of neighbourhoods where Israeli estimates suggested up to a quarter of residents were still sheltering. The film documents the systematic burning of civilian homes and the killing of people at a food distribution site — scenes that collectively suggest a pattern of behaviour far removed from the actions of isolated actors.
Examining the Architecture of Killing
Abraham and Szor have been emphatic that NAZA is not concerned with sporadic war crimes committed by rogue soldiers. “It is on the orders themselves, the policies, the accepted practices, the language and logic that make those practices possible, and the people who operate within them,” the directors stated. “The system and its cogs.”
At a press conference in Venice, Abraham explained the approach that coaxed these insiders to speak: “We just told these officers: ‘Please describe to us what you did. How do these systems work? Sketch it out for us.’ Sometimes, in just asking the questions, you get the answers.” He noted that reactions varied widely. “Some of them did not express remorse and some did. Some spoke out of indifference, some out of pride.”
The directors framed the film as a deliberate act of accountability. “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 their statement.
A Premiere That Broke the Sound Barrier
The reaction at the Sala Grande was nothing short of seismic. According to Variety, the nearly 25-minute standing ovation following the screening was a record for the length of applause not only at Venice but at any major film festival. Jonathan Glazer, the executive producer and Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest, embraced Abraham and Szor as the audience rose to its feet, while some attendees held up Palestinian flags.
Alberto Barbera, the Venice Film Festival’s artistic director, had already set high expectations before the screening, calling NAZA “truly groundbreaking” and describing it as “a politically disruptive and cinematically extremely interesting work.” “It took them three years to convince these Israeli intelligence and military officials to share the work they did when the invasion of Gaza began, and I assure you, their testimonies are shocking,” he told journalists.
The documentary builds on investigative reporting first published by the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language Local Call, and the Guardian between 2023 and 2025. It was filmed and produced under tight security protocols to protect confidential journalistic sources, and its contents remained a closely guarded secret until Thursday’s premiere.
Paul Lewis, the Guardian’s head of investigations and an executive producer on the film, described NAZA as the culmination of “years of painstaking work to uncover and verify the systems used by Israeli military intelligence in Gaza.”
Connecting the Dots
NAZA is the second major documentary from Abraham and Szor, who were among four co-directors of No Other Land, the film that won the Oscar for best documentary in 2025. That earlier work, made alongside Palestinian co-directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, documented the destruction of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and the broader apparatus of occupation and ethnic supremacy.
The directors drew a direct line between the two projects. “In No Other Land, we spent five years documenting the army destroying Palestinian homes in order to paint a larger picture of a system of occupation and ethnic supremacy aimed at the removal of Palestinians from the West Bank,” they said. “In NAZA, we are similarly connecting the dots of a system, gathering the testimonies of two dozen intelligence officers and soldiers and depicting the military systems used to perpetrate what a UN commission and the world’s leading human rights groups have described as a genocide.”
Since the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which killed more than 1,200 people and saw 251 taken to Gaza, Israeli attacks have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, and injured more than 174,000 others — together representing over 10% of Gaza’s prewar population. Israeli restrictions on food shipments created a man-made famine last summer, and the military has razed or damaged more than three-quarters of all homes, leaving surviving Palestinians crowded into tent camps with scarce clean water and sanitation.
Abraham said the process of making NAZA offered its own kind of catharsis and clarity. “In this film we’re talking to 24 people. We are looking at systems of mass killing. There is something about cinema that allows you to explore structures and systems and how you put things together.”
Why It Matters
NAZA represents something rare and unsettling in the landscape of war reporting: an indictment delivered by the perpetrators themselves. The fact that 24 Israeli military and intelligence insiders chose to speak — risking prosecution, ostracism, and their personal safety — lends the film a gravity that external journalism alone could never achieve. By shifting the lens from individual misconduct to institutional policy, the documentary challenges the notion that civilian deaths in Gaza are incidental, instead presenting them as the predictable output of deliberately designed systems. As the evidence mounts and international legal proceedings unfold, films like NAZA ensure that the structural reality of what occurred cannot be so easily dismissed, denied, or forgotten.
