NAZA walked away from Venice with a 25-minute standing ovation and the festival’s Special Jury Prize.
Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the team behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land, a highly contested documentary whose critics have accused it of presenting a tendentious and misleading account of events, and produced by The Guardian with Jonathan Glazer as executive producer, the film rests on testimony from 24 anonymous alleged former Israeli military and intelligence personnel.
Its thesis, delivered by Abraham in the film’s own framing, is that the killing of Gazan civilians was not incidental to the war against Hamas; it was the design.
An AI system called Lavender, the film claims, generated up to 70,000 human targets, while a companion system assigned each strike a tolerable number of collateral deaths, the “NAZA,” an acronym for “Nezek Agavi,” Hebrew for collateral damage.
One interviewee cites a rate of 15 to 20 permitted civilian deaths per action. Another claims a strike was approved with an anticipated toll of 500. The film calls this a factory of targets and, through one interviewed officer, uses the word “genocide.”
The IDF has flatly denied it, calling the 500-casualty claim fabricated and stating that targeting decisions are made by trained personnel under military and international law, not algorithms. Israeli politicians across the spectrum called the film a blood libel.
Set the factual dispute aside and examine only the logic the film asks its audience to accept, because that logic collapses before any fact gets checked: If the goal was “genocide,” actual mass killing of a civilian population as such, why would anyone build an AI targeting system to do it?
Genocide does not require precision. It requires the opposite.
The Hutu militias who killed roughly 800,000 Tutsis in barely 100 days in 1994 did it mostly with machetes. The Nazi Einsatzgruppen murdered over a million Jews with rifles and open pits. Dresden and Tokyo were leveled by unguided incendiary bombs dropped by the thousand, no algorithm required, because civilian loss was the point and nobody needed a computer to get there.
A military bent on erasing a population does not build software to identify individual operatives inside specific apartments. It carpet bombs the map, since dumb bombs kill more people faster and cheaper than any precision system devised. If the IDF wanted what NAZA claims, Lavender was an act of self-sabotage, a machine built to slow and narrow a slaughter indiscriminate ordnance could finish in a fraction of the time.
The film’s own testimony gives away the game. An AI system that scores targets, ranks militant affiliation, and attaches a projected casualty count to each strike is not a genocide machine.
It is a triage system, crude and imperfect, built to distinguish combatants from civilians in a war where the enemy worked to erase that distinction, fighting out of uniform, out of homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and tunnels beneath all of it. You do not build a discrimination tool to commit an indiscriminate crime.
However executed, the tool’s function is to sort combatants from civilians and target only the former, the opposite operation from “genocide,” which sorts nobody.
Then there is the geography the film’s promotion omits.
Gaza, roughly 365 square kilometers, held about 2.1 million people before the war (and notably still does), with a density of roughly 5,900 to 6,000 per square kilometer by CIA and World Bank figures, denser than the Netherlands and India, in the range of Singapore, among the 15 to 20 most densely populated territories on earth.
In a place that crowded, with Hamas fighters embedded in and under residential buildings by their own admitted strategy, you need a map and an air force to kill large numbers of civilians, not artificial intelligence. Any officer with a grid reference and an order to fire could produce mass civilian casualties in an afternoon without an algorithm.
That Israel instead built systems to identify individual operatives, attach casualty estimates to individual strikes, and argue internally, by the film’s own sources, over whether 15 or 20 was too high, is evidence of an institution straining to discriminate inside an environment its enemy engineered to make discrimination nearly impossible, not evidence of an army that wanted to kill everyone.
Unraveling the film's thesis
The film's deeper trick is treating a collateral damage calculation itself as the crime.
But proportionality analysis, weighing a strike’s likely civilian toll against military necessity, is not an Israeli invention. It is the standard legal process every modern Western military has run before nearly every airstrike since NATO formalized collateral damage estimation in the 1990s, refined over Kosovo, applied through Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
The United States has its own version; so does Britain, and every signatory bound by the Geneva Conventions’ 1977 Additional Protocols.
NAZA does not argue Israel should abandon that process. It argues that running it, something every other Western army runs routinely, becomes genocidal only when the flag on the jet is Israeli. That is not a legal argument. It is a double standard applied to one state, and a double standard applied to the one Jewish state that has a name.
The casualty math compounds the absurdity. Genocides do not produce ambiguous death tolls debated by demographers. Rwanda killed close to 70% of its Tutsi population in a hundred days. The Holocaust killed roughly two of every three Jews in Europe.
Every documented genocide in history has been measured by the fraction of a people erased, not a raw total from a two-year war against an enemy embedded in tunnels beneath its own civilians.
Labeling a war with a reported toll near 73,000, unverified and never broken down by combatant status, a “genocide” on the strength of a casualty-tolerance memo empties the word of its meaning as the gravest charge in international law.
Strip away the AI framing, and NAZA is really arguing that no foreseen civilian harm should ever be legally tolerable, that proportionality doctrine itself should be abolished. That is a real debate. But abolish it for everyone or defend it as written; do not deploy it only against the one army that documents its calculations, then call the paper trail evidence of guilt.
An army that keeps no record faces no such indictment. The real beneficiary is not international law but every terrorist group and dictatorship that hides fighters among civilians because it answers to no public and keeps no comparable record to leak.
None of this means every strike in Gaza was justified, or that mistakes did not happen in arguably the most difficult urban combat terrain in the world. It means the film’s central move – dressing up targeting technology and a legal process that every Western army performs as proof of genocidal intent – fails the moment you ask what a military genuinely bent on genocide would do differently.
It would not build Lavender. It would not calculate a collateral damage rate. It would not need to know which apartment the target slept in. It would level the block, or the city, the way armies with no such compunction have done throughout modern military history.
That the IDF did not do that is not a detail NAZA can explain away. It is the detail that unravels the film’s thesis before the opening credits finish rolling.
The writer is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.