Israeli film on Gaza receives 25-minute ovation at Venice premiere

What the report says

Al Jazeera reports that NAZA, an 80-minute Israeli documentary about Israel’s use of AI-assisted targeting systems in Gaza, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on September 10, 2026, and was met with a 25-minute standing ovation. The film was directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who previously won an Oscar for No Other Land. According to the report, the project took nearly three years to make and relies on testimony from Israeli military and intelligence personnel whose identities were concealed and whose voices and faces were altered for the film.

The documentary focuses on an alleged AI-assisted system referred to as “Lavender” and on the wider process of identifying targets in Gaza. Al Jazeera says interviewees in the film describe mass-scale targeting and express concern about civilian homes, humanitarian law, and hostility toward Palestinians. Abraham said the film aims to show in detail how the killing systems operated and to press Western governments to reduce support for Israel through sanctions.

The report says the title NAZA is a Hebrew intelligence term used to estimate civilian casualties from airstrikes. It also places the film in the context of the wider war in Gaza, noting that Israel’s campaign has killed and wounded large numbers of Palestinians since October 2023, according to Gaza’s health authorities. As background, the Venice premiere is notable because NAZA is the only documentary in competition this year and follows a similar Gaza-related film at last year’s festival that also drew an extended ovation.