“There are no innocents in Gaza,” is said to be the belief which lay at the heart of Israel’s system for selecting and attacking targets in the besieged enclave, according to Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers interviewed for a new documentary exposing how the military authorised the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.
NAZA, directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, draws on three years of interviews with 24 soldiers and intelligence personnel involved in Israel’s targeting operations. Their testimony describes a military apparatus that combined AI-assisted targeting, mass surveillance and predetermined civilian casualty thresholds to approve strikes in Gaza.
According to +972 Magazine, where Abraham is a journalist, the soldiers describe a system in which attacks on homes were authorised despite advance knowledge that civilians would be killed, including in cases where the intended target had little military significance. “You understand that the objective is to destroy,” one officer recalled.
The premise described by the interviewees also reflected statements made at the highest levels of the Israeli state. Days after 7 October, 2023, Israeli President Isaac Herzog declared that “an entire nation” in Gaza was responsible, dismissing arguments that civilians were unaware of or uninvolved in the Hamas-led attack as “absolutely not true”. South Africa later cited Herzog’s remarks in its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
