Venice (AFP) – A new documentary from two Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers provides damning new testimony about AI-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.
Issued on: 10/09/2026 - 13:48
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Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor said they had collected evidence from 24 different Israeli military or intelligence figures who agreed to testify on camera in Tel Aviv as long as their identities were 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", draws its name from a euphemism used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that are expected to be killed in an airstrike.It is the only documentary in competition at this year's Venice Film Festival which wraps up on Saturday."NAZA" sees Israeli servicemen and women describe in detail how the mass surveillance of Gaza, an occupied Palestinian territory where the entire telecoms network is monitored by Israel, was combined with AI technology to identify people for assassination."The mass surveillance is directly related to the mass killing, and it is what was able to also create a stream of justifications for the mass killing," Abraham, 31, told AFP.Israel's bombardment of Gaza has left around 73,500 Palestinians dead and 174,500 wounded since October 2023, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures the United Nations deems reliable.The pounding of Gaza followed an attack inside Israel by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, that resulted in the death of 1,219 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.-- Oscar winners --Along with Palestinians Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, Abraham and Szor shot to fame with their film "No Other Land" about Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 2025.
