Overview
- The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday and received a roughly 24–25 minute standing ovation, one of the longest in the festival’s history.
- NAZA assembles on-camera, anonymized testimony from 24 current and former Israeli military and intelligence personnel who say an AI-aided targeting process identified and authorised strikes on Gaza homes with expected civilian casualties.
- Interviewees describe a system called Lavender that they say used mass surveillance and telecommunications data to generate target lists that analysts then reviewed before strikes, a claim the film traces back to multi-year reporting by outlets including The Guardian, +972 and Local Call.
- The Israel Defense Forces has publicly rejected the film’s central allegation, saying its tools are analytical aids, human review is required before any strike, and it does not pursue a policy of deliberately killing civilians.
- The film’s Venice reception, its Guardian production credit and its anonymization measures are likely to widen public and diplomatic pressure for further investigation even as independent verification remains constrained by limited access to Gaza and contested casualty figures.