Deadline: NAZA accuses Israel of using AI to kill civilians in Gaza

Matthew Carey’s Deadline review is dated 12 September 2026, the night a late Venice entry won the Special Jury Prize. He describes 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers, filmed in silhouette on Tel Aviv rooftops, voices digitally altered. One participant, he reports, says that if he does not hide his identity, Israel will jail him for what he exposes. Carey defines NAZA, in the press-notes spelling Nezek Agavi, as the collateral-damage figure treated as acceptable while trying to kill suspected Hamas militants. The number, according to the personnel in the film, was elastic: sometimes under a dozen, sometimes 200, sometimes 500.

The operational claims he attributes to the interviewees are specific. Strikes on homes were timed for night because a suspected militant was more likely to be there with his family. Phones are described as emitting a periodic ping. One person says every sensor on a phone can be activated. Another says he heard the final moments of someone’s life. The artificial-intelligence system named in the review is Lavender, which Carey says was first reported by +972 Magazine and Local Call, with further reporting by The Guardian, a producer of the film. Sources in the documentary, he writes, put the number of human targets Lavender produced at up to 70,000. Some personnel say snipers fired on hungry Palestinians at food sites after supplies were blocked in the north to push people south. One says he saw, by drone, dogs eating corpses. Another describes a political unit that collected compromising material on Palestinian victims of war crimes because they were treated as a security threat. The name he quotes for that work is “peace thwarting.”

Carey prints the IDF spokesperson’s reply. The military categorically rejects the allegations and says strike decisions are made by people, under IDF guidelines, not by artificial intelligence. Carey notes the spokesperson had not seen the film and was answering publications. The statement says those publications describe anonymous testimonies whose service and role cannot be verified, and that some strategic claims are beyond junior soldiers. It says the IDF acts against Hamas under international law and makes unprecedented efforts to minimise civilian harm. Carey sets beside that a Gaza Ministry of Health figure: more than 73,000 Palestinians killed and more than 173,000 wounded since the response to the 7 October 2023 attack.

The review quotes the directors on silence, the line also printed on the Biennale listing, and lists sales as mk2 and the running time as one hour and 20 minutes. Reader comments under the piece are not a source. The prize note is the Guardian press office. The timeline is https://nazafilm.org/record/timeline, screenings are at https://nazafilm.org/showings, and the watch page is https://nazafilm.org/watch.