You sit on a darkened rooftop in Tel Aviv, looking out over a city at peace, while a man in uniform calmly explains how algorithms choose who dies tonight. This is the harrowing opening premise of NAZA, a documentary directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, the film tears open the bureaucratic machinery of modern warfare, offering testimony from twenty-four Israeli military and intelligence insiders who operated the machinery of automated destruction in Gaza.
Most discussions about military conflict focus on battlefield clashes or political declarations. This film does something entirely different. It exposes an industrial pipeline of violence where artificial intelligence, mass surveillance, and remote-controlled air strikes merge into a system designed to distance perpetrators from the physical reality of their actions.
Inside the Automated Killing Chain
The documentary draws its title from a military acronym used by intelligence operatives to quantify expected civilian deaths in an incoming strike. It is a linguistic abstraction designed to make mass casualties sound like a clean metric.
The insiders interviewed in the film—whose appearances and voices were digitally altered to protect their identities—describe a system that relies heavily on automated targeting tools. These systems trawled through vast datasets of communication metadata and phone signals, recommending residential apartment buildings for bombardment.
Instead of manual target vetting by human commanders, automated platforms rapidly generated lists of low-ranking militant suspects. These targets were frequently struck at night inside their homes, where officers knew their families and children were sleeping.
Intelligence personnel routinely hacked mobile networks to pinpoint exact locations. According to the film's sources, officers monitored intercepted phone conversations between targets and their wives and children, listening to domestic routines moments before ordering strikes that flattened entire residential blocks.
The Distance of Remote Warfare
Distance changes how people perceive violence. When targets are reduced to glowing pixels on a screen in a Tel Aviv office, the visceral horror of warfare vanishes.
The documentary highlights how this spatial separation acts as a psychological buffer for operators. You do not hear the screams under the rubble when you click a button miles away. Yet, as the directors point out, these intelligence officers knew precisely what they were destroying. They listened to the phone calls. They knew the children were inside. They processed the data, calculated the acceptable casualty thresholds, and authorized the ordnance anyway.
Reactions from the insiders vary wildly. Some speak with chilling indifference, while others display pride in the raw processing speed of the automated tools. A few express deep remorse, which is precisely why they took the immense personal risk of speaking out.
Official Responses and Immediate Fallout
The release of NAZA has triggered intense political friction. The Israel Defense Forces issued swift statements rejecting the film's allegations, criticizing the reliance on anonymous sources, and maintaining that the military takes unprecedented precautions to minimize civilian harm.
Conversely, the international film community has rallied around the directors. Following its festival debut, the documentary faced severe political pushback, including threats directed at its creators. Despite the backlash, the film shines a harsh light on how modern technological warfare institutionalizes civilian casualties through cold, calculated automation.
If you want to understand how algorithmic targeting reshapes modern ethics, watch the film or read the investigative reporting underpinning it. The machinery of war has changed, and transparency is the only tool left to challenge it. Take time to look past the sanitized language of military briefings and confront the administrative reality of automated violence.
