Documentary premieres with testimony on Israel’s secret Gaza targeting systems

Insider testimony reaches the Venice festival

A documentary built around testimony from 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on September 10. The film, NAZA, examines systems used to identify targets, monitor Palestinians and authorize attacks during Israel’s war in Gaza. Its participants include people who say they worked directly with surveillance and remote-strike processes. Their identities and voices were concealed because of the risks attached to discussing classified military practices.

The film describes a high-volume targeting structure in which automated tools generated potential low-ranking Hamas targets and military personnel then approved attacks on homes. According to the Guardian’s account of the documentary, insiders also described phone surveillance, listening to family conversations and estimating civilian deaths before strikes. Those are allegations presented through the film’s witnesses, not findings from a new judicial proceeding, and individual operations described by anonymous participants cannot all be independently reconstructed.

Why the allegations carry wider weight

The documentary’s central themes align with concerns previously documented by United Nations experts. A February 2026 UN report on the destruction of housing and civilian infrastructure said artificial-intelligence systems including Gospel, Lavender and Where’s Daddy had reportedly been deployed by the Israeli military. It warned that automated target generation, limited human oversight and attacks on people at home created risks of disproportionate civilian harm. That institutional record independently establishes the wider targeting-system context, though it does not authenticate every new testimony in the film.

NAZA also shifts attention from isolated misconduct to the design of command systems: how intelligence is gathered, how a person becomes a target and how expected civilian casualties are assessed. That distinction matters for accountability. If operational harm resulted from accepted procedures rather than unauthorized actions by individuals, investigators would need to examine rules of engagement, approval chains, data quality and commanders’ knowledge, not only the conduct of personnel who released weapons.

What comes next

The immediate development is the film’s public premiere and the disclosure of its collected testimony, not a newly confirmed military strike. The next tests will be whether named institutions answer its detailed allegations, whether source material can be assessed by independent investigators, and whether legal or parliamentary bodies seek records about the systems. Israel’s military position and any formal response must be evaluated separately. The documentary may become evidence for scrutiny, but a film screening by itself does not establish criminal liability.