Venice Documentary Features 24 Anonymous Israeli Soldiers Describing AI-Assisted Gaza Killings

Since Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack killed 1,219 people in Israel, the war in Gaza has killed roughly 73,500 Palestinians and wounded 174,500, according to Gaza's Hamas-run Health Ministry, whose figures the United Nations considers reliable, according to an AFP report carried by Courthouse News Service. That death toll is now the backdrop for a new documentary that premiered Thursday at the Venice Film Festival. The film, called NAZA, was directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the pair behind the Oscar-winning 2025 documentary "No Other Land." It was produced by The Guardian and Britain's James Wilson, with Jonathan Glazer of "The Zone of Interest" serving as executive producer, according to Anadolu Agency. It is the only documentary competing for the festival's Golden Lion, and Venice's competition wraps up Saturday.

What the soldiers said

The 80-minute film is built on interviews with 24 Israeli military and intelligence figures, filmed anonymously at night on Tel Aviv rooftops with their faces and voices digitally altered, according to The Guardian, which produced the film. The title comes from a Hebrew military acronym intelligence officers reportedly used to refer to the number of civilians expected to die in a strike. According to testimony described by The National News, one interviewee said "20 Naza" became an internal benchmark for an acceptable civilian death count when targeting a single suspect, and that the highest number he recalled being approved for one strike was 500. Interviewees described AI-based systems, including one referred to as "Lavender," used to generate large lists of suspected low-ranking Hamas operatives who were then bombed in their homes at night, according to The National News and The Guardian. Multiple soldiers described hacking into phones to locate targets and listening to their conversations with wives and children, in some cases shortly before the strikes, according to the Guardian and Anadolu Agency. The film also includes accounts of snipers firing on Palestinians gathered at food distribution sites, according to The National News. Reactions from the interviewees varied. "Some of them did not express remorse and some did," Abraham said at a Venice press conference, according to The Guardian. "Some spoke out of indifference, some out of pride." One soldier who worked on the AI targeting system told filmmakers he felt "uncomfortable" but reasoned that "if I hadn't been there, someone else would've done it," according to The National News. Asked directly whether what he took part in constituted genocide, one interviewee answered "yes" without hesitation, per the same review.

What is proven and what is not The testimony in NAZA comes from the soldiers' own accounts

of their work, filmed on condition of anonymity, which the directors say builds on investigative reporting published between 2023 and 2025 by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian, according to Anadolu Agency. Abraham told AFP, in comments carried by Courthouse News Service, that he has concluded Israel's government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is "violating the Genocide Convention of 1948" and said he hopes the film pushes Western governments toward sanctions. That is the director's own stated conclusion and goal, not an independent legal finding. Israel disputes the premise directly. The country "says it does not deliberately target civilians in Gaza and accuses Hamas of hiding among the population of the densely populated and besieged territory," according to AFP's reporting via Courthouse News. Israel has not filed any legal response to the film specifically, and no war-crimes charges against the named systems or programs described in NAZA have been announced by any court as of this writing.

The counter-argument on "genocide" claims

Critics of the broader genocide framing around Gaza point to cases where earlier claims did not hold up. The Epoch Times, in a piece by David Harsanyi, noted that U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher warned in May 2025 that 14,000 babies would die within 48 hours without aid, a claim later clarified to refer to a projected 14,000 malnutrition cases among 1 million children over a year, not imminent infant deaths. The same piece cited a UNICEF-led nutrition survey that later found acute malnutrition in Gaza at 0.5%, among the lowest in the region, and noted the U.S.-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation had delivered roughly 187 million meal equivalents before the ceasefire. That critique addresses humanitarian and famine-related claims specifically, not the targeting-system testimony at the center of NAZA, which comes from soldiers describing their own operational conduct rather than aid or nutrition statistics. The two sets of claims rest on different evidence and shouldn't be conflated, but both illustrate how contested and politically weighted the "genocide" label around Gaza has become on both sides. NAZA's Golden Lion result is set to be announced when the Venice Film Festival concludes Saturday. Whether the film prompts any government inquiry, in Israel or elsewhere, into the specific targeting systems and phone-surveillance practices described by name in the testimony remains an open question; none has been announced as of this writing.