Testimony from 24 Israeli military insiders on the secret systems used in the war on Gaza has been revealed in a new documentary film about the mass killing of Palestinian civilians. NAZA, a film from the Oscar-winning Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, was shown at the Venice international film festival on Thursday as the only documentary competing for its prestigious Golden Lion award. The film’s title comes from an Israeli military acronym used euphemistically to refer to civilians expected to be killed in a military attack.
Produced by the Guardian, it features extensive testimony from Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers involved in the surveillance and remote killing of Palestinian civilians. Interviews were filmed at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv, on the condition of anonymity because of the risks involved in speaking publicly about Israel’s war activities. The appearance and voices of participants in the film were digitally altered to disguise their identities.
The interviewees detail the secret methods used by the Israeli military in Gaza, including AI-based systems built to identify large numbers of potential low-ranking Hamas targets, who were then bombed in their homes at night, in the knowledge attacks would also kill their families. The Israeli military hacked into phones to identify the location of such targets, and covertly listened into conversations with their wives and children moments before they were all killed. The film also features first-person accounts about the destruction of neighbourhoods where the Israeli military estimated that up to 25% of residents were still sheltering in their homes, the systematic burning of civilian homes, and the killing of civilians at a food distribution site.
Several interviewees worked in a secret intelligence unit that reports directly to the office of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; one said their mission was to “thwart peace”. The directors stressed the film’s focus was not on “sporadic war crimes committed by rogue soldiers”. NAZA builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and the Guardian between 2023 and 2025.
It was filmed and produced under tight security because of the risk to confidential journalistic sources, and its contents have remained a closely guarded secret before 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”. Before the premiere, Alberto Barbera, the Venice film festival’s artistic director, told journalists NAZA would be “truly groundbreaking”, calling it “a politically disruptive and cinematically extremely interesting work”.
Israeli restrictions on food shipments created a man-made famine last summer, and the Israeli military razed or damaged more than three-quarters of homes, so surviving Palestinians are now crowded into tent camps with little access to clean water or sanitation. Israel launched its war after the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, when more than 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken to Gaza by militants. The majority of the dead and hostages were civilians.
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