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

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

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

The film is the outcome of an investigation spanning nearly three years, based on testimony from Israeli military and intelligence sources speaking anonymously. Their identities 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 term referring to the expected number of civilian casualties in an air strike. Interviewees describe an AI-assisted system called “Lavender”, which utilized 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 describes the process as “like a video game, because everything is done remotely” and “insanely fun”.

Some interviewees discussed 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”.

“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 told AFP.

The film was produced by the UK’s Jim Wilson with The Guardian, with executive producer Jonathan Glazer – the team behind The Zone of Interest, which won the 2024 Oscar for best international feature.

NAZA is the only documentary competing at this year’s festival, which concludes on Saturday, following last year’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, which received a 23-minute ovation and won Venice’s second prize.