The Israeli-British NAZA documentary premiered in competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on 10 September 2026, where it received a record-breaking 24.5-minute standing ovation.

NAZA is a Hebrew military acronym (from nezek agavi) used by Israeli intelligence to mean "collateral damage" — specifically, the number of civilians expected to be killed in a given airstrike. Rather than naming women, children, or families, operators refer to projected civilian deaths as a simple count: "4 NAZA," "20 NAZA," "500 NAZA."

The 2026 documentary NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (two of the four co-directors of the Oscar-winning No Other Land), takes its title directly from this euphemism.

Shot in secrecy at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the 80-minute film features anonymized interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers who describe, in their own words, the systems — AI-driven targeting, phone surveillance, drone strikes — used to carry out what the film characterizes as the calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

The title is itself a critique: by reducing human lives to a numerical "NAZA" figure, the military language obscures the intent and scale of civilian deaths, a practice the film exposes through the perpetrators' own testimony.

📱 ROBINMG