The system and its cogs.
Twenty-four Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers sat on Tel Aviv rooftops, faces and voices disguised, and described the machinery of the Gaza war from the inside: the software that generated the targets, the rule that let a junior militant be killed alongside fifteen civilians, the word they used for those civilians — NAZA.
The documentary is the third thing you need beside the doctrine and the death toll. The doctrine is the stated intent; the toll is the scale; this is the method, in the operators' own words. The systems it describes are documented fact. The hardest question it raises — whether the method amounts to genocidal intent — is the one now before the world's courts, and we pose it rather than rule on it.
What this page is about
NAZA — the Hebrew military acronym nezek agavi, “collateral damage” — is an 80-minute documentary by the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, produced by the Guardian and executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer, the director of The Zone of Interest. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2026 as the only documentary competing for the Golden Lion, won the Special Jury Prize, and drew a standing ovation reported at nearly 25 minutes. Its substance is testimony from 24 Israeli military and intelligence insiders — filmed anonymously, with faces and voices digitally altered — describing how the Gaza war was targeted and fought from the inside.
Most of what they describe was first reported in 2024, by Abraham himself, for the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language Local Call: an AI system called Lavender that flagged tens of thousands of suspected low-ranking militants; a companion tracker, “Where's Daddy?”, that signaled when a target went home so he could be bombed there with his family; and Habsora (“The Gospel”), which generated building targets. NAZA's new contribution is that the people who built and ran these systems now say so on camera — describing pre-authorized civilian death counts (“15 NAZA”), relaxed restrictions (“at the start of the war, we bombed everything”), and the surveillance power one called feeling “a bit like God.” The directors are explicit that their subject is not rogue soldiers but “the orders themselves, the policies, the accepted practices … the system and its cogs.”
We grade this carefully, because the subject is the most sensitive we cover. The film, the prizes, the testimony, and the systems themselves are fact — corroborated, not invented, and now spoken by the operators. The IDF rejects the film's portrayal, says humans and not machines make targeting decisions, and specifically disputes the claim that it approved a strike expecting 500 civilian deaths; we carry that in full. And the sharpest claim — that this machinery proves the intent to destroy that defines genocide — we pose rather than assert, because intent of that kind is decided by courts, and the question is live before the International Court of Justice. It belongs beside the Dahiya Doctrine and the death toll charted to scale: the doctrine, the scale, and now the machine.
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The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Step through it here, or present it fullscreen.
The System and Its Cogs.
NAZA: 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers describe the machinery of the Gaza war from the inside — the software that generated the targets, the rule that let a junior militant be killed with fifteen civilians, the word they used for those civilians. The doctrine, the scale, and now the machine.
What the film shows, graded
NAZA is a real, award-winning documentary by Israeli filmmakers, built on 24 insider testimonies.
FACTNot a fringe artifact. NAZA — from nezek agavi, the Israeli military's own acronym for anticipated civilian 'collateral damage' — is an 80-minute film by Yuval Abraham (the +972/Local Call journalist who co-directed the Oscar-winning 'No Other Land') and Rachel Szor, produced by the Guardian and executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2026 as the only documentary in competition for the Golden Lion, won the Special Jury Prize, and received a standing ovation reported by Variety at nearly 25 minutes. Its content is testimony from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops with their identities digitally disguised because of the risk of speaking publicly. The existence, provenance, and reception of the film are matters of record.
The targeting systems are real and were documented before the film — NAZA corroborates them from the inside.
FACTThe machinery NAZA describes was first reported in 2024, by Abraham, for +972 Magazine and Local Call, based on interviews with six intelligence officers. 'Lavender' was an AI system that flagged suspected low-ranking Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives — generating on the order of 37,000 potential targets early in the war — which officers reportedly reviewed for as little as 20 seconds apiece despite a known error rate around 10%. A companion system, 'Where's Daddy?', tracked flagged men and signaled when they returned to their family homes, where they would be struck. 'Habsora' ('The Gospel') generated building targets. The reporting also described pre-set 'collateral' allowances — on the order of 15 to 20 civilians permitted for a single junior target, far higher for senior ones. These are the systems NAZA's insiders now describe on camera. That the systems exist is not the film's novel claim; it was established two years earlier and is not seriously disputed.
The film's new contribution is first-person testimony from the operators — attributed, and graded as testimony.
FACTWhat NAZA adds to the 2024 reporting is the operators' own voices. A source who worked on Lavender, asked whether innocent people were killed after being misidentified, answers: 'Yes for sure. There's no doubt.' Another, asked how many may have died because of a system he built, estimates 'more than hundreds, if not thousands … masses of people.' Others describe the early-war collapse of restraint ('at the start of the war, we bombed everything; NAZA wasn't an issue'); the bureaucratic euphemism that recorded anticipated dead as a number ('15 NAZA' rather than fifteen people, some of them children); and the surveillance reach — access to the cameras and microphones of Palestinians' phones — that made one feel 'a bit like God.' We grade FACT that the film contains this testimony, as quoted by the Guardian and reviewers. We do not overstate what the format proves: the witnesses are anonymous and disguised, their individual claims can't be independently checked one by one, and we present them as corroborating insider accounts, not as a verified ledger.
The IDF rejects the film's portrayal — and we carry that denial in full.
FACTIsrael's military strongly disputes NAZA. It says humans, not AI, make targeting decisions, and that systems like Lavender assist intelligence analysts rather than independently approving strikes. It says commanders assess expected civilian harm, take feasible precautions, and cancel strikes when the risk is judged too high — and it specifically rejects the film's allegation that it approved a strike in which 500 civilian deaths were anticipated. Many in Israel have condemned the directors for making it. It is a FACT that this is the IDF's position, and the dispute between 'the system decided' and 'the system only advised a human who decided' is genuine and unresolved from the outside — it is one of the places honest readers should keep their eyes open rather than assume the worst reading is proven.
That the machinery proves genocidal intent is the posed question — serious, sourced, and not for us to rule on.
SOME SMOKEThis is the hinge, and it is where honest and bad-faith readings part. Genocide, in law, is distinguished from other grave crimes by one element: the intent to destroy a group, in whole or in part, as such. That intent is almost never openly admitted; it must be inferred — from statements, from the methods used, and from their repetition. NAZA is, by design, methods and statements from inside the machine: a system that accepts large civilian death counts by default, a doctrine (documented separately) that prescribes disproportionate destruction, and operators describing a belief that 'there were no uninvolved civilians.' That is exactly the category of evidence a genocide inquiry weighs. But a documentary is not a court, insider testimony is not a verdict, and lawful-but-devastating war can produce much of the same testimony. So we grade SOME SMOKE and pose it: the method is documented fact; whether it clears the law's high bar for intent is the question South Africa has put to the International Court of Justice and the ICC put behind its November 2024 arrest warrants — and we do not get ahead of their answer.
The dual-stance fence: Israelis exposing this is not antisemitism, and testimony is not a verdict.
FACTTwo guardrails hold this page up. First, the people behind NAZA are Israeli — Israeli filmmakers, interviewing Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, out of what the directors call an obligation to examine 'the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible.' Treating that act of internal reckoning as an attack on Jews is precisely the conflation we reject across our coverage: it would make the most credible possible witnesses — the perpetrators' own colleagues — unspeakable. Second, cutting the other way: we do not let the horror of the testimony substitute for the legal finding. Anonymous accounts, however credible and corroborated, are evidence to be weighed, not a conviction. What survives both guardrails is narrower and still grave: the systems are real, their operators have described them, and the description belongs in front of the courts now weighing it.
Not a revelation of facts, a revelation of faces
It matters to be precise about what is new here, because overclaiming is how a real story gets waved away. Almost none of the facts in NAZA are first disclosed by it. Lavender, “Where's Daddy?”, the Gospel, the 20-second reviews, the pre-set civilian allowances — all of that was published in April 2024 by the same journalist, Yuval Abraham, in +972 Magazine and Local Call, and corroborated by subsequent reporting. If you had read that investigation, the architecture of the war was already on the page.
What the film adds is the thing print could not: the operators saying it themselves, on camera, about their own hands. A developer of Lavender confirming, flatly, that innocent people were killed — “Yes for sure. There's no doubt.” A source estimating the dead from a system he built in the hundreds or thousands — “masses of people.” The quiet horror of the bureaucratic language: anticipated civilian deaths logged not as people but as a figure, “15 NAZA.” The admission that, early on, “we bombed everything,” under a spreading belief that in Gaza there were “no uninvolved civilians.” This is the difference between knowing a system exists and watching the people inside it describe, without much remorse, how it felt to run. That is not new evidence of what happened. It is new evidence of how it was understood by the people who did it — which is exactly the evidence that questions of intent turn on.
The directors drew the line themselves. Their subject, they said, is “not sporadic war crimes committed by rogue soldiers” but “the orders themselves, the policies, the accepted practices, the language and logic that make those practices possible, and the people who operate within them. The system and its cogs.” That framing is why this page sits where it does: a story about rogue soldiers would belong to the courts-martial; a story about a system belongs beside the doctrine that designed it.
Why a film can bear on a genocide case
The reason NAZA is being discussed in the language of international law, and not only film criticism, comes down to how genocide is proven. What separates genocide from other mass crimes is not the number of dead; it is the intent to destroy a group, in whole or in part, as such. And that intent, as prosecutors and courts repeat, is almost never written down or confessed. It has to be inferred — from statements by those responsible, from the methods used, and from the repetition of those methods over time. A pattern, deliberately built and routinely applied, can speak to intent in a way a single strike never could.
NAZA is, almost by construction, a catalogue of exactly that category of evidence: method and statement, from the inside, repeated across 24 witnesses. A system that treats a defined number of civilian deaths as acceptable by default. A tracker built to catch a man at home with his family. A relaxation of restraint described as policy, not accident. A belief, spreading through the ranks, that there were no civilians to protect. Lay that beside the Dahiya Doctrine, Israel's own published strategy of disproportionate destruction, and the death toll off the scale of every prior phase, and you have the three things an intent inquiry looks for: the stated plan, the method, and the result.
And then the fence, because it is load-bearing. Evidence that bears on intent is not the same as a finding of intent. Much of what NAZA's witnesses describe could also be testimony about a brutal but lawful war fought in dense urban terrain against an enemy that embeds in it; the law's bar for genocidal intent is deliberately high, set so that atrocity alone does not meet it. That is why the right verb is pose, not prove. The case is already where it belongs: South Africa's genocide proceeding against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and the ICC's November 2024 arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former defense minister Gallant. A documentary cannot settle that. What it can do — what this one does — is put the method, in the operators' own voices, into the record the judges will read.
The cogs are the point
The most effective defense of any mass-harm system is that no one chose it — that the deaths were the tragic friction of war, the work of a few bad actors, the unavoidable cost of fighting an enemy who hides among civilians. NAZA's quiet power is that it is told by the opposite of bad actors: ordinary, competent people who built and ran the machine and, for the most part, believed they were doing their jobs. That is what a system is. It does not require monsters; it requires cogs, and a logic that lets each cog turn without feeling like the one responsible. The word “NAZA” itself is the tell — a term whose entire function is to let a planner write down the number of people a strike will kill without having to picture them.
That is why the film earns its place in this file rather than in a review section. We are not qualified to render the verdict, and we do not. But we can insist on the thing the courts will also insist on: that the question of what happened in Gaza is a question about a system, deliberately designed and routinely operated, and that the people who designed and operated it have now said so. Whatever the law finally decides, the record will not be able to claim no one knew how it worked.
- If a system logs the number of civilians it expects to kill before each strike and proceeds anyway, at what point does “collateral damage” stop describing an accident and start describing a choice — and who is accountable for the choice when it was made by a spreadsheet nobody feels they authored?
- The facts in NAZA were public in 2024 and changed little; the faces in NAZA arrived in 2026 and changed the conversation. What does it say about how atrocity is processed that a system becomes real to the world only when its operators are willing to be seen describing it?
- Israeli filmmakers and Israeli insiders produced the most damning account yet of their own military's conduct. If the people closest to the evidence are the ones raising the alarm, on what basis is the alarm dismissed as bias from the outside?
Questions worth taking seriously
If the systems were already reported in 2024, is the documentary really news?
The facts aren't new; the testimony is. Lavender, “Where's Daddy?”, the 20-second reviews, the pre-set civilian allowances — all of that was published in April 2024 by the same journalist, Yuval Abraham, in +972 Magazine and Local Call. What NAZA adds is the operators describing it on camera, in the first person, about their own work: a Lavender developer confirming innocent people were killed (“Yes for sure. There's no doubt”), a source estimating the dead in the thousands, the bureaucratic logging of anticipated deaths as “15 NAZA.” That shift — from documented system to self-described system — is exactly what matters for questions of intent, which turn on what the people involved understood themselves to be doing.
Doesn't the IDF say this is a distortion — that humans, not AI, make the decisions?
Yes, and we carry it in full. The IDF strongly rejects the film: it says humans, not AI, make targeting decisions, that systems like Lavender assist analysts rather than approving strikes on their own, that commanders assess expected civilian harm and cancel strikes when the risk is too high, and it specifically denies approving a strike expecting 500 civilian deaths. The “the system decided” versus “the system only advised a human who decided” dispute is genuine and can't be resolved from the outside, which is one reason we grade the intent question Some Smoke rather than treating the worst reading as proven. What is not seriously disputed is that the systems exist and were used at scale; the fight is over how much human judgment sat between the software's output and the bomb.
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- The Guardian (the film's producer) — secret systems used by Israel in mass killings revealed in NAZA
- +972 Magazine / Local Call (April 2024) — ‘Lavender’: the AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
- Action on Armed Violence — what NAZA reveals, and what was already known (with the insider quotes)
- AJC — what to know about NAZA, including the IDF's response
- NAZA (2026 film) — credits, Venice premiere, Special Jury Prize
- Black Book Audit — The Dahiya Doctrine (the doctrine)
- Black Book Audit — Off the Charts (the scale)
- Black Book Audit — Israeli Influence