'NAZA' in Venice: When Counting the Casualties Becomes the Crime

On Thursday, the Venice Film Festival rose to its feet for 25 minutes for "NAZA." The 80-minute documentary by Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — the only documentary among the 21 films competing for the Golden Lion — compiles the testimonies of 24 Israeli soldiers interviewed over three years, most of them intelligence officers who worked remotely, their identities concealed, filmed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops. Their account: surveillance, target selection, and strikes ordered in the knowledge that civilians would die.

The title is the program. "NAZA" is the Hebrew military acronym for "collateral damage": the civilians whose deaths are anticipated in an attack on a military objective. In the left-wing magazine +972, the directors explain that their film describes a system in which civilian deaths were "calculated in advance" rather than suffered as unforeseen consequences. One officer states: "You understand that the goal is to destroy."

The IDF answered point by point. The army "categorically rejects the claim of any policy aimed at killing tens of thousands of people in their homes," according to a statement carried by the Guardian. Every target undergoes an assessment of the expected military advantage and the likely collateral damage; a strike does not go ahead if the anticipated civilian harm is excessive; the intelligence systems described are tools for analysts, not target-designating machines; independent human validation precedes any action. And Hamas embeds its fighters and its assets among civilians.

Here is the reversal nobody on the Lido picked up on. What the film presents as the confession of the crime — "we knew how many civilians would die" — is precisely what the laws of war require of an army. The principle of proportionality demands that collateral damage be estimated before a strike. The army that doesn't calculate is the one committing war crimes; the one that calculates is the one applying the law. By turning the calculation itself into the exhibit, "NAZA" doesn't expose an Israeli aberration: it indicts the rule that separates an army from a militia. The IDF puts it soberly: the film strips conventional military considerations — a target's value weighed against the damage it causes — out of their context.

It's also worth looking at who is speaking. Abraham and Szor made "No Other Land," the 2025 Oscar winner for best documentary, about Judea and Samaria. The Guardian co-produced "NAZA" — the same newspaper that had published the preliminary investigations and that now carries the army's response: producer, investigator and chronicler all at once. Jonathan Glazer, whose 2024 Oscars speech linked "The Zone of Interest" to Gaza, is executive producer. And among the seven jurors sits Tunisia's Kaouther Ben Hania, whose "The Voice of Hind Rajab" won last year's Grand Jury Prize after a 23-minute ovation, then a record. It has been beaten: 25 minutes. Every year, Venice applauds the same trial a little longer.

The directors say they are aiming "inward, at Israeli society." The Israeli reactions reported by JTA say the opposite: a combat veteran of Gaza, Lebanon and Syria says there was "never a situation where entire families were killed intentionally" and denounces the slander of "hundreds of thousands of fighters." The intended audience doesn't recognize itself. The film was shot in Tel Aviv, but it was made for the Lido.

Then there's the precedent. If the prior estimate of civilian casualties becomes proof of criminal intent, no army that has ever struck a city while applying proportionality will escape it tomorrow. Israel is merely the test case. What Venice is cheering isn't the end of a war: it's the end of a rule.