(AFP) — A new documentary from two Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers provides damning new testimony about artificial intelligence-enabled mass killings in Gaza from the men and women who took part, the directors told AFP on Thursday ahead of its premiere in Venice.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor said they collected evidence from 24 Israeli military or intelligence figures who agreed to testify on camera in Tel Aviv on the condition that their identities be protected.
“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 like, how they operated.”
Their film, “NAZA,” takes its name from a euphemism used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians expected to be killed in an airstrike.
The result of a nearly three-year investigation, it is the only documentary competing at this year’s Venice Film Festival, which ends Saturday.
In “NAZA,” Israeli service members describe in detail how Israel combined AI technology with mass surveillance of Gaza, including monitoring the territory’s entire telecommunications network, to identify people to kill.
“The mass surveillance is directly related to the mass killing,” Abraham, 31, told AFP.
Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed about 73,500 Palestinians and wounded 174,500 since October 2023, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, whose figures the United Nations considers reliable.
The bombardment followed the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,219 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Oscar winners
Along with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, Abraham and Szor won an Oscar in 2025 for their film “No Other Land,” about Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank.
Their latest film was produced by Britain’s Jim Wilson with help from Jonathan Glazer — the team behind the Oscar-winning, Auschwitz-set film “The Zone of Interest” — and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
Abraham and Szor, both investigative journalists, said they hoped the film would encourage Western nations to withdraw their support for Israel and apply pressure through sanctions.
“Those of us inside Israel and Palestine trying to fight for change, need it,” Abraham told AFP. “You are weakening the people inside who are supporting human rights and a political solution by refusing to act.”
Israel says it does not deliberately target civilians in Gaza and accuses Hamas of hiding among the population of the densely populated and besieged territory, where about 2 million people lived before the war.
But Abraham said he had concluded that Israel’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “violating the Genocide Convention of 1948” and was committed to expelling Gaza’s population.
The film includes references to the Holocaust.
“I’m not saying it’s the same. I don’t think it is. I think what we should be doing is recognising similar patterns of dehumanisation,” he said.
Public opinion
“NAZA” was a late addition to the main competition in Venice this year, where organizers have selected several films about the Gaza conflict.
Last year, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” a docudrama about Israeli forces’ killing of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza, won second prize at the festival.
The films, along with growing condemnation of Israel’s conduct in Gaza from leading entertainment figures, are part of a broad shift in public opinion in Western countries against the war and Israeli policies.
U.S. actor Susan Sarandon, one of the most persistent critics of the bombardment, said this week that the narrative surrounding Gaza and U.S. financial and military support for Israel had “completely changed.”
“There’s a lot of things that people are aware of now,” the “Thelma & Louise” star told a news conference.
Foreign journalists have been prevented from reporting independently from Gaza since the conflict began, entering only under tightly controlled conditions with the Israeli military.
Some Israeli journalists have questioned the war, “but it’s very, very few, especially in the mainstream media,” Szor told AFP.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says more than 200 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, constituting “the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented.”
Subscribe to our free newsletters
Our weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing
trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world,
while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood,
sports, Big Tech and the arts.