NAZA, from the makers of No Other Land, alleges civilian deaths in Gaza were built into Israeli targeting decisions. The film received the longest standing ovation in the festival's history — and reopened a row that has followed its director since Berlin in 2024.
By Matthaios TsimitakisA new documentary examining how Israel selected targets for air strikes in Gaza received what is being described as the longest standing ovation in the 83-year history of the Venice Film Festival, after its premiere on Thursday night.
NAZA, from the Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — two of the four directors of the Oscar-winning No Other Land — was applauded for about 24½ minutes at the Sala Grande; it surpassed the previous Mostra record, set last year by Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab, another Gaza-set film.
Jonathan Glazer, the Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest and an executive producer on NAZA, embraced Mr Abraham and Ms Szor as the applause continued; members of the audience held up Palestinian flags. The film is the only documentary among the 21 titles competing for this year's Golden Lion.
The 80-minute film is built around interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, filmed anonymously at night on Tel Aviv rooftops, their faces and voices digitally altered. Gaza itself appears only briefly, near the end.
The film's title comes from a Hebrew military acronym — Nezek Agavi — used informally by Israeli intelligence to denote the number of civilian deaths expected to result from a strike. According to the interviewees, that expected toll was calculated and factored into targeting decisions rather than treated as an unintended side-effect. One officer describes what he calls 'mass killing on an industrial scale'.
Much of the testimony concerns an artificial-intelligence system referred to in the film as 'Lavender', which the interviewees say drew on mass surveillance of Gaza's telecommunications network — phone calls, movements and contacts — to help generate lists of potential targets. In one striking claim reported by Reuters, intelligence officers said a phrase such as a child saying 'daddy's home', picked up on a monitored phone, could be enough to help trigger a strike.
Mr Abraham told AFP: 'We are letting the soldiers and the officers speak about what they did'. Writing with Ms Szor in the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine on the day of the premiere, he said: 'We made this film for one simple reason' — to use their position as Israelis with access to those who served in the military to examine a system that human rights organisations have described as genocidal.
The Israel Defense Forces has rejected the film's central claim. In a statement, the military said it flatly denied operating any policy of killing large numbers of civilians in their homes. Israel has consistently said it takes extensive precautions to avoid civilian casualties and that Hamas embeds fighters and military infrastructure among the civilian population of Gaza — a claim Hamas denies.
The film builds on investigative reporting published between 2023 and 2025 by +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and The Guardian, including earlier reporting on the Lavender system.
NAZA is produced by The Guardian and the British producer James Wilson, of JW Films, and executive produced by Mr Glazer — the team behind The Zone of Interest. It is Mr Wilson and Mr Glazer's first collaboration with Mr Abraham and Ms Szor.
Mr Abraham, 31, an Israeli journalist and Arabic-Hebrew translator born in Beersheba, and Ms Szor, a cinematographer and editor who has also worked with Arte Journal, were two of the four directors of No Other Land, alongside the Palestinian film-makers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. That film, which documented the demolition of Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2024 and won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in March 2025.
Mr Abraham's public profile — and the backlash that followed him into Venice — dates to that Berlinale ceremony. Accepting the documentary award alongside Mr Adra in February 2024, he called for equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians, a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the occupation, noting that although the two men were the same age, he lived under Israeli civilian law with full voting rights, while Mr Adra, like millions of Palestinians in the West Bank, lived under military law without the right to vote.
The remarks drew strong criticism in Israel and Germany, where some politicians and commentators characterised them as antisemitic; Mr Abraham rejected that description, saying the speech had been about equality, ending the occupation and stopping the violence in Gaza. He later said he had received death threats against himself and his family and delayed his return to Israel, telling reporters at the time that he stood 'behind every word' of what he had said.
NAZA is expected to screen next at the San Sebastián International Film Festival on September 23 and at the New York Film Festival on September 26. MK2 Films is handling international sales; no theatrical release date has yet been announced.
