Secret Israeli systems used in Gaza killings revealed in film

Testimony from 24 Israeli military insiders ​on the secret ​systems used in ​the war on Gaza​ has been revealed in a new documentary film about the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.

NAZA, a film from the Oscar-winning Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, was shown at the Venice international film festival on Thursday as the only documentary competing for its prestigious Golden Lion award.

The film’s title comes from an Israeli military acronym used euphemistically to refer to civilians expected to be killed in a military attack. Produced by the Guardian, it features extensive testimony from Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers involved in the surveillance and remote killing of Palestinian civilians.

Interviews were filmed at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv, on the condition of anonymity because of the risks involved in speaking publicly about Israel’s war activities. The appearance and voices of participants in the film were digitally altered to disguise their identities.

The interviewees detail the secret methods used by the Israeli military in Gaza, including AI-based systems built to identify large numbers of potential low-ranking Hamas targets, who were then bombed in their homes at night, in the knowledge attacks would also kill their families.

The Israeli military hacked into phones to identify the location of such targets, and covertly listened into conversations with their wives and children moments before they were all killed.

The film also features first-person accounts about the destruction of neighbourhoods where the Israeli military estimated that up to 25% of residents were still sheltering in their homes, the systematic burning of civilian homes, and the killing of civilians at a food distribution site.

Abraham said at a press conference in Venice on Thursday: “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.

“Some of them did not express remorse and some did. Some spoke out of indifference, some out of pride.”

Several interviewees worked in a secret intelligence unit that reports directly to the office of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; one said their mission was to “thwart peace”.

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“We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli film-makers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible,” Abraham and Szor said in their directors’ statement.

The directors stressed the film’s focus was not on “sporadic war crimes committed by rogue soldiers”. “It is on the orders themselves, the policies, the accepted practices, the language and logic that make those practices possible, and the people who operate within them,” they said. “The system and its cogs.”

The documentary was co-produced by James Wilson and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, the same team behind the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.

The film received a nearly 25-minute standing ovation after its screening, according to Variety, which called it a record for length of applause not just at Venice but at any major film festival and reported that Glazer embraced Abraham and Szor as it went on, while some members of the audience held up Palestinian flags.

NAZA builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and the Guardian between 2023 and 2025. It was filmed and produced under tight security because of the risk to confidential journalistic sources, and its contents have remained a closely guarded secret before Thursday’s premiere.

Paul Lewis, the Guardian’s head of investigations and an executive producer on the film, described NAZA as the culmination of “years of painstaking work to uncover and verify the systems used by Israeli military intelligence in Gaza”.

Abraham said making the documentary had provided space to explore the collective impact of that work. “In this film we’re talking to 24 people. We are looking at systems of mass killing. There is something about cinema that allows you to explore structures and systems and how you put things together.”

Before the premiere, Alberto Barbera, the Venice film festival’s artistic director, told journalists NAZA would be “truly groundbreaking”, calling it “a politically disruptive and cinematically extremely interesting work”.

“It’s not just any collection of interviews,” Italy’s Cinecittà News quoted Barbera as saying. “It took them three years to convince these Israeli intelligence and military officials to share the work they did when the invasion of Gaza began, and I assure you, their testimonies are shocking.”

Israeli attacks in Gaza since 2023 have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, and injured more than 174,000 others, together representing more than 10% of Gaza’s prewar population.

Israeli restrictions on food shipments created a man-made famine last summer, and the Israeli military razed or damaged more than three-quarters of homes, so surviving Palestinians are now crowded into tent camps with little access to clean water or sanitation.

Israel launched its war after the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, when more than 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken to Gaza by militants. The majority of the dead and hostages were civilians.

Abraham and Szor were two of the four co-directors of No Other Land, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 2025.

Drawing a connection between the two films, the directors said: “In the film No Other Land, we spent five years, together with [Palestinian co-directors] Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, documenting the army destroying Palestinian homes in order to paint a larger picture of a system of occupation and ethnic supremacy aimed at the removal of Palestinians from the West Bank.

“In NAZA, we are similarly connecting the dots of a system, gathering the testimonies of two dozen intelligence officers and soldiers and depicting the military systems used to perpetrate what a UN commission and the world’s leading human rights groups have described as a genocide.”