‘NAZA’ San Sebastian Review: This Chilling Exposé Lifts The Veil On Israeli Intelligence’s Algorithmic War

NAZA isn’t a name but an acronym for «Nezek Agavi,» which in Hebrew means «collateral damage.» It is, put simply, the term the Israeli Armed Forces and Intelligence services use to designate the civilian victims of a conflict. «1 NAZA» or «200 NAZA» is how the number of «undesired» deaths from a bombing or strike gets reported. And the way the country handles that collateral damage in Gaza is the central axis of this exposé documentary, directed by two of the three filmmakers behind No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary from 2024.

Produced by the British newspaper The Guardian —which will release it on YouTube in November— NAZA draws on the testimony of two dozen people, most of them Israeli Intelligence personnel who have worked or continue to work using artificial intelligence to detect the possible targets of the Hamas terrorist organization and eliminate them, supposedly, in the most clinical way possible. With their faces hidden and their voices altered, the interviewees speak in every case seated on a rooftop of a building in central Tel Aviv, at night. And with brutal candor, they explain how a system works that prioritizes killing the target in question while disregarding the collateral damage those bombings generate.

NAZA is, in its own way, a film about what modern warfare looks like now —run from offices and by computers, with AI programs that detect targets, track their movements, calculate the supposed cost-benefit, and execute the plans. Nearly every interviewee walks through the modus operandi, in some cases even using graphics, making clear along the way that the NAZA count of each operation is secondary for the Israeli government. Chiefly because, by «infiltrating» the mobile phones of every resident of Gaza who owns one, the easiest way to identify a target and keep him under spatial-temporal control is inside his own home, where he lives with his wife and children. And if he has to be killed there, so be it.

The interviewees don’t just explain the system that enables these bombings; they also describe the cruel, brutal manner in which they’re carried out, including bringing down entire buildings to eliminate a single terrorist leader. In their statements —always addressed to Abraham, the only person we see on camera— the interviewees mention cases of 200 or 300 NAZAs in a single operation, and others describe deciding to bomb while listening to their targets talking with their children at home. There are many other equally terrifying accounts.

NAZA —winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival— is also a documentary that erases any doubt about what intelligence services can do with people’s mobile phones, which they essentially seize and use as their own personal spies, moving from location data to cameras, microphones, and every piece of information stored on them. It’s by breaking into those circuits that Israeli AI manages to locate its targets and verify them across time and space. What it cannot do is remove the target from the civilian, family contexts in which he lives and moves.

The filmmakers combine the testimonies with archival footage and, above all, with aerial and nighttime shots of Tel Aviv, located just 60 kilometers from the Gaza Strip and full of ultramodern buildings where people appear to inhabit a reality utterly removed from the scorched earth nearby —comfortable in their homes, watching the news on TV, or carefree at parties. NAZA also focuses on how Israeli society justifies what is done in Gaza —in light of the horrific Hamas attack of October 2023— to the point that several of those interviewed took a long time to distance themselves from the events in which, in one way or another, they had taken part. And many still haven’t.

That invites, once again, a reflection on the old analysis of «the banality of evil» so closely tied to the Second World War. Here, too, are analysts who believed —or once believed— that the technical nature of their work in these operations kept them at a remove from the criminal acts themselves, treating what happens as if it were a video game, something without real consequences. It’s mostly programmers and AI specialists who account —not all of them— for their change of heart about what they were doing. It’s striking, too, to hear them note that most people working in this field are progressive, and don’t consider themselves racist or anti-Palestinian, yet they still form or formed part of this technological machinery of terror.

The film is weakened somewhat by its inability to to give the interviewees’ real names or discuss specific cases, which will surely give those who deny the existence of these inhuman operations grounds to dismiss what’s presented here. But that won’t stop anyone who watches and listens to what these whistleblowers have to say from recognizing the level of violence, cruelty, and lack of humanity deployed in operations that seek to destroy every inhabitant of an entire country… by whatever means necessary.