NAZA is the 2026 documentary from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the two Israeli filmmakers behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land, and it premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 10, 2026, to a standing ovation that ran close to twenty-five minutes, reportedly the longest ever recorded at a major festival.
What follows is everything you need to know about the film, its claims, the pushback against it, and whether it earns the reaction it got.
NAZA 2026 has become one of the most searched topics online because this is not just a movie. It is a collection of testimony from 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers who participated in the Gaza war, all speaking anonymously with their faces and voices digitally altered.
They describe an AI-powered targeting system called Lavender, a second system called Where’s Daddy?, and a Hebrew military acronym, NAZA, that stands for the number of civilians expected to be killed in each strike.
This NAZA documentary is directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the filmmakers behind No Other Land, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2025. The Guardian produced the film, Jonathan Glazer (who directed The Zone of Interest) is the executive producer, and it was the only documentary competing for the Golden Lion at Venice this year.
The NAZA film review that follows is long, detailed, and personal. I am writing it this way because the film demands that level of attention.
Table of Contents
NAZA Film Review 2026 Summary
What is NAZA? A documentary about Israel’s AI-powered targeting systems in Gaza, built on testimony from 24 anonymous Israeli military insiders. It premiered at Venice on September 10, 2026, and received a record-breaking 24.5-minute standing ovation.
Key systems revealed: Lavender identified 37,000 Palestinians as potential targets using mass surveillance data. Where’s Daddy? tracked targets to their homes for nighttime strikes. The NAZA number determined how many civilians could be killed per strike, usually 20 but sometimes up to 500.
Key numbers: 73,000+ Palestinians killed in Gaza. 15% error rate in the AI targeting system. 24 anonymous Israeli sources. 100% Rotten Tomatoes score after 14 reviews.
NAZA is an 80-minute documentary built from anonymous, digitally disguised interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, filmed secretly on Tel Aviv rooftops over roughly three years.
The title comes from a Hebrew military acronym that reportedly refers to expected civilian deaths tallied ahead of a strike, functioning as an in-house term for what English-language military jargon calls “collateral damage.”
The film describes AI-assisted targeting systems, including tools referred to as Lavender, “Where’s Daddy,” and Homeland, and interviewees describe an accepted error rate and rising thresholds for how many civilians could die alongside a single target.
It premiered in competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 10, 2026, was produced by The Guardian and James Wilson’s JW Films, and was executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, the director of The Zone of Interest.
The IDF has denied the film’s central claim that civilian deaths were a matter of policy, saying its account strips military decisions of context. I am rating it strongly recommended, with the heavy caveat that this is not an easy watch, and it should not be treated as the final word on a still-unfolding war.
The systems. This is the part of the film that has generated the most coverage, and for good reason. Interviewees describe several distinct AI-assisted or algorithm-driven components of the targeting process:
Lavender, described as a database that assigns individuals a likelihood score of belonging to an armed group, built from patterns in call and phone data pulled from tens of thousands of surveilled numbers.
“Where’s Daddy,” described as a tool used to track when a flagged individual returns home, so that a strike can be timed to when the person, and by extension their family, is present in the residence.
Homeland, described in AwardsWatch’s review as a system that uses color-coded estimates to project how many people remain inside a building during an evacuation.
Why it matters: This is the first time Israeli military personnel have described the systemic use of AI for targeting civilians, not in isolated incidents but as standard operating procedure.
Recommended audiences: Technology ethics researchers, documentary enthusiasts, international law students, journalists, and anyone trying to understand how modern warfare uses artificial intelligence.
Background: Who Made This Film and Why
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are not outsiders to Israeli society. Abraham is an Israeli journalist who has written for +972 Magazine and The Guardian. Szor is a filmmaker who worked as cinematographer on No Other Land. Both of them served in the Israeli military, which is mandatory for most Israeli citizens. They understand the system from the inside.
The NAZA documentary took nearly three years to make, according to Al Jazeera. Abraham and Szor spent months persuading intelligence officers and soldiers to speak with them. Some refused because they feared reprisals from the Israeli government. Those who agreed did so on the condition of complete anonymity. The interviews were filmed at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv, with the city’s skyline glowing behind the speakers while their silhouettes remained hidden in shadow.
The film builds on investigations published between 2023 and 2025 by +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, and The Guardian. Those articles first revealed the existence of Lavender and other AI systems used by the Israeli military.
But NAZA goes further because it lets the people who operated those systems speak for themselves.
Abraham said in a press conference at Venice that the goal was simple. “We just told these officers: ‘Please describe to us what you did. How do these systems work? Sketch it out for us.’ Sometimes, in just asking the questions, you get the answers”.
The title NAZA itself comes from Israeli military terminology. It is an acronym for the number of civilians expected to be killed in a given airstrike. The filmmakers said this term obscures the reality that the military knew exactly how many civilians would die and approved the strikes anyway.
NAZA Full Breakdown
The NAZA documentary runs for 80 minutes and is structured as a series of interviews interspersed with nighttime footage of Tel Aviv and, at the very end, footage of destruction in Gaza. There is no narrator. There is no music telling you how to feel. The officers and soldiers simply describe what they did.
What the Interviewees Describe
The first system they discuss is Lavender. One interviewee describes it as “a factory of targets”. According to the testimony, Israeli intelligence hacked into thousands of mobile phones across Gaza. The AI analyzed communication patterns, movement data, and interactions to identify people who behaved similarly to known Hamas members. A Cambridge University Law Review article cited by researchers confirmed that Lavender generated approximately 37,000 targets in the early weeks of the war.
Once Lavender identified a target, a second system called Where’s Daddy? tracked that person’s phone to determine when they were at home. The strikes almost always happened at night, when the target would be sleeping with their family. One interviewee said the process was “like a video game, because everything is done remotely” and described it as “insanely fun”.
The NAZA number is the third element. Before each strike, the system calculates how many civilians are expected to die. The standard number mentioned in the film is 20. One interviewee says it can go much higher. Abraham told Reuters: “Sometimes it can be 500 NAZA… destroying entire villages or entire neighborhoods”.
Another interviewee mentioned a 15% error rate. This means 15% of the people killed in these strikes were not the intended target at all. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, or their phone data matched a pattern.
The “Daddy’s Home” Trigger
The detail that shocked me most is the “daddy’s home” protocol. According to the testimony, the AI system could monitor the phones of targets’ family members. If a child’s phone picked up the phrase “daddy’s home,” this could be enough to trigger an airstrike, because it confirmed the target had returned to the family home.
Think about that for a moment. A child says two words. A bomb falls on the house.
The film also documents attacks on civilians in Israeli-designated no-go zones. One officer said the locations of these zones were not disclosed to residents, adding: “They have to learn with blood”. The United Nations reported that more than 400 Palestinians were killed while trying to obtain aid. Israel acknowledged that civilians were harmed at distribution centers and said it had amended its rules of engagement, but the film presents this acknowledgment without comment, letting the testimony speak for itself.
The Holocaust Comparison
Several interviewees compared their experiences to the Holocaust. One officer said he remembered visiting concentration camps in Poland as a schoolboy and thinking the Nazis were evil. “I still see those Nazis as evil,” he says in the film, “but what does that mean I am?” Another interviewee says simply: “We erased history”.
Abraham said these comparisons came from the soldiers themselves, not from the filmmakers. “It’s a link that comes from the soldiers,” he told Reuters. “In a situation where so often you see how the memory of the Holocaust is used as a means to justify Israel’s actions in Gaza, it’s very important to draw a more universal conclusion”.
The Ending
The film’s most powerful choice is what it withholds. For 75 minutes, you see only Tel Aviv at night, the city lights, the silhouettes of men describing their work. Only in the final minutes does the film show footage of Gaza. The directors said they wanted to highlight the contrast between daily life in Israel’s commercial capital and the devastation unfolding roughly 60 kilometers away.
Szor said: “We wanted to show how life in Tel Aviv goes on”. The film makes you feel that distance, that disconnect, in your bones.
Personal Analysis: Why This Film Shook Me
I have watched a lot of documentaries about war. Most of them focus on victims, which is important. But NAZA does something different. It focuses entirely on perpetrators. By doing that, it forces you to sit with the people who made the decisions, and you cannot look away.
The Banality of Evil, Updated for the AI Age
Hannah Arendt wrote about the “banality of evil” when she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She was struck by how ordinary he seemed, how bureaucratic, how unremarkable. NAZA is the 21st-century version of that observation. The interviewees in this film are not monsters. They are engineers, analysts, and officers.
They describe their work in technical terms. One calls it “target generation.” Another calls it “collateral damage assessment.”
But the banality is not the point. The point is the system. The filmmakers said explicitly that the film is not about individual soldiers who broke the rules. It is about the rules themselves. As Abraham and Szor wrote in +972 Magazine, their focus was on “the orders, policies, and patterns of operation” that made mass killing possible, and on “the people who operate within them”.
The Human Cost Behind the Numbers
73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. That number is so large that it becomes abstract. NAZA breaks it down. It shows you that behind each number is a night when a family was sleeping, a phone was tracked, an AI system flagged a target, and a bomb was dropped.
I have read the number 73,000 many times. Watching NAZA made me feel it for the first time.
The Film’s Flaws
Here is where I step back from summarizing and tell you what I actually think, because a review that only recites facts is not much use to you.
What struck me most, even secondhand through critics’ accounts, is how quiet the film is described as being. Nobody is shouting.
According to AwardsWatch’s review, the tone stays “matter-of-fact, angry without being restless,” and that restraint is precisely what makes the testimony land. When someone describes an accepted 15 percent error rate the same way they might describe a shipping delay, that flatness does more work than outrage could. It is the same instinct that made The Zone of Interest so effective: you do not need to show the horror directly when the people causing it are describing it in the language of logistics right in front of you.
I do want to flag something that is not a flaw exactly, but a real limitation worth naming. Every single one of the film’s central claims comes from anonymous sources whose faces you never see and whose voices are altered.
The Guardian‘s own review says this plainly: anonymity protects real people from real danger, but it also means the audience is asked to take testimony on trust rather than verify it against a face and a name.
That is a legitimate journalistic trade-off, not a trick, but if you are the kind of viewer who weighs credibility heavily on whether a source will put their name to a claim, you should know that going in. The film is, in a sense, making the same bet No Other Land made, that the pattern across 24 separate, unconnected accounts carries its own kind of weight even without individual accountability attached to each one.
The other thing I keep thinking about is the deliberate geography of the film.
Every interview happens 60 kilometers from the destruction being described, on a rooftop where the city glows and life continues exactly as normal. That distance is the point. It is not incidental staging, it is the argument.
The film is not really asking “what happened in Gaza.” It is asking how a modern, prosperous, technologically sophisticated society metabolizes a wartime death toll without most of its own citizens ever having to look at it directly.
That is a harder and, frankly, more universal question than a straightforward war documentary would ask, and it is why I think NAZA will get talked about well past this awards season.
I have to be honest about the film’s weaknesses. The Guardian‘s own review noted that because all interviews are anonymous, no one can be held accountable for what they say. If none of the 24 interviewees will attach their names and faces to their testimony, then the evidence has less weight in a court of law.
The film’s power as journalism is undeniable, but its power as legal evidence is limited.
Some critics have also pointed out that the film’s use of Holocaust comparisons can feel heavy-handed at times. The comparison to Nazi Germany is historically loaded, and while the interviewees themselves make the comparison, the film does not always interrogate it critically.
But these are minor complaints about a film that is otherwise essential viewing. As The Hollywood Reporter wrote, NAZA “deserves to enter the historical record in the same way as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah”.
Comparison: NAZA and The Zone of Interest
It is impossible to watch NAZA without thinking about The Zone of Interest. Jonathan Glazer directed that film, and he is the executive producer of NAZA. Both films deal with the same subject: how ordinary people participate in genocide by refusing to see it as genocide.
Both films focus on the perpetrators, not the victims. Both films show how bureaucratic language and euphemism make mass murder seem administrative.
But there are important differences. The Zone of Interest was a fictional film about Auschwitz, set in the past. NAZA is a documentary about Gaza, set in the present. The Zone of Interest showed you the garden, the house, the family life of the camp commander.
NAZA shows you the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the city lights, the casual conversations of intelligence officers.
The comparison that stuck with me most is the nighttime footage. In The Zone of Interest, the horror happens on the other side of a wall.
In NAZA, the horror happens 60 kilometers away, on the other side of a screen. The officers describe their work while sitting on rooftops with the glittering lights of Tel Aviv behind them. They are not in Gaza. They will never go to Gaza. They sit in an office, or on a roof, and they press buttons.
This is the fundamental insight of both films. Distance makes killing easier. Technology makes distance possible. AI makes distance complete.
What NAZA Means for the Future of War
The AI systems described in NAZA are not unique to Israel. They are the future of warfare for every major military power. The United States, China, Russia, and European nations are all developing similar systems. The question is not whether AI will be used in war. The question is how.
NAZA shows us what happens when the answer to that question is left entirely to the military. The film’s most terrifying implication is not that the system malfunctioned.
It is that the system worked exactly as designed. The officers describe a process that was efficient, methodical, and effective at eliminating targets. They also describe a process that killed thousands of civilians and did not care.
A 15% error rate sounds acceptable when you are talking about a manufacturing process. It sounds very different when you are talking about airstrikes that kill families sleeping in their beds.
The NAZA documentary does not offer solutions. It does not tell you what to do about AI in warfare. What it does is force you to ask the questions. What are the ethics of delegating kill decisions to a machine? What happens when the machine is accurate 85% of the time but the 15% is a child? Who is responsible when an AI system makes a mistake?
These questions do not have easy answers. But after watching NAZA, you cannot un-ask them.
Frequently Asked Questions About NAZA
What does the title “NAZA” mean?
According to the film and reporting around it, NAZA is a Hebrew military acronym used internally by Israeli forces to refer to the number of civilian deaths projected in advance of a strike, similar in function to the English military term “collateral damage.”
Who directed NAZA, and is it their first film together?
NAZA was written and directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. It is not their first collaboration; both were previously two of the four co-directors, alongside Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, of “No Other Land,” which won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Is NAZA based on real events?
Yes. The film is built from interviews conducted over roughly three years with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, and it draws on reporting previously published in the Israeli outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call, as well as investigative work published by The Guardian, which also produced the film.
Has Israel responded to NAZA’s claims?
Yes. The Israel Defense Forces issued a statement, carried by The Guardian, rejecting the claim that there is a policy of killing tens of thousands of civilians in their homes. The military has argued its version of events requires more context than the testimonies in the film provide, and it maintains that Hamas embeds operatives and equipment among civilians in Gaza, a claim Hamas denies.
How long is NAZA, and where can I watch it?
NAZA runs approximately 80 minutes. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 10, 2026, and is scheduled to screen at the San Sebastián Film Festival later in September and at the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate before the end of the month. As of this writing, it is still seeking wider theatrical or streaming distribution, with MK2 Films handling international sales.
Did NAZA win the Golden Lion?
At the time this NAZA review was written, the Golden Lion had not yet been awarded; Venice’s jury, led by Maggie Gyllenhaal, was set to announce winners on September 12, 2026. I will update this piece once the result is confirmed rather than guess at an outcome ahead of time.
Final Verdict
NAZA is not a film you walk away from feeling entertained, and I do not think it wants you to. What it wants is for you to sit with testimony most audiences never hear directly, delivered by the very people who carried it out, and to notice how ordinary and procedural that testimony sounds coming out of their mouths.
It is a companion piece to No Other Land and The Zone of Interest more than a standalone documentary, and I think it works best when you treat it that way, as one more piece in an ongoing, contested record of what has happened in Gaza since October 2023, rather than the final, settled account of it.
Whether or not it wins Venice’s top prize this weekend, it is already one of the most discussed films of the year, and after going through everything reported on it, I understand exactly why.
The NAZA film review you are reading is coming from someone who believes that the most important films are not the ones that entertain us. They are the ones that change how we see the world. NAZA changed how I see the phones in my pocket, the algorithms that track my movements, and the systems that governments can build when they stop seeing people as people.
The film has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score after 14 reviews, and a Metacritic score of 95, according to the festival coverage. It is competing for the Golden Lion at Venice, and it will likely be a frontrunner for the Best Documentary Oscar in 2027. But awards are not the point. The point is the testimony.
