NAZA, directed by Israeli Oscar winners Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, received a 25-minute standing ovation at its Venice premiere.
The film details Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
The documentary is based on a three-year investigation featuring anonymous, digitally altered testimonies from Israeli military and intelligence personnel filmed in Tel Aviv.
Gaza Documentary NAZA Gets Record-Breaking 25-Minute Ovation At Venice Premiere
Director Yuval Abraham called on Western governments to halt support for Israel and use sanctions to aid those advocating for human rights.
Summary
At the Venice Film Festival, the 80-minute documentary NAZA from Israeli No Other Land directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor received a thunderous 25-minute standing ovation at its premiere. The film examines claims that Israel used AI-powered systems to target Palestinians in Gaza.
It is the longest-ever standing ovation in Venice — beating the 22 minutes for The Voice of Hind Rajab last year.
In 2025, Abraham and Szor won an Oscar for No Other Land, a documentary about Israeli settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank, made with Palestinian co-directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal.
About NAZA
It grew out of a nearly three-year investigation. The film relies on anonymous testimony. Israeli military and intelligence sources supplied the accounts after agreeing to keep their identities concealed.
The filmmakers digitally altered their voices and faces. They shot the interviews after dark on Tel Aviv rooftops.
“We are letting the soldiers and the officers speak about what they did,” Abraham told AFP. “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 title refers to a Hebrew intelligence euphemism for the civilian toll expected from a specific air strike.
Interviewees describe an AI-assisted system known as “Lavender”. Those accounts say it drew on Gaza’s monitored telecommunications network like phone calls, movements and interactions to identify assassination targets.
Abraham said he wanted the film to prod Western governments into ending support for Israel and using sanctions as leverage. “Those of us inside Israel and Palestine trying to fight for change need it. You are weakening the people inside who are supporting human rights and a political solution by refusing to act,” he said, referring to Israel’s supporters.
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Abraham and Szor told +972 Magazine that the film concluded that the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza “was not a ‘tragic byproduct’ of a war against Hamas… but a premeditated, calculated, and intentional act”.
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