It has arrived in Italian cinemas NAZAthe documentary by Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, which analyzes the use of AI by Israeli military forces in the Gaza Strip and which immediately reached the top of the box office, becoming the most watched film in Italy over the weekend. NAZA is a Hebrew acronym for Nezek Agaviwhich means “collateral damage”, and is used by Israeli military intelligence to indicate the estimate of possible civilian casualties associated with an attack.
The documentary, based on journalistic investigations published between 2023 and 2025 by the Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call, describes the mechanisms and systems used by the Israeli army in operations that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians. This military system in the documentary is told by 24 intelligence officers and soldiers involved in surveillance and targeting operations who speak anonymously. A real war machine emerges entrusted to technology and algorithms, which has raised an international debate on the ethical and legal implications linked to the automation of life or death decisions – and has been contested by the IDF. The Israel Defense Forces released an official response to the film, speaking of errors, manipulations and “distorted vision”, arguing that Lavender is not an autonomous system, but a tool used by analysts and subjected to human evaluation. Following this, a response documentary was released, Naza: The Real Story49 minutes long, with the collaboration of the IDF, which collects testimonies from Israeli officers and contests the reconstruction proposed by NAZA.
Attention: the Israeli-Palestinian issue is extremely complex and delicate and we are aware that any type of summary risks omitting information; therefore this article must be seen in the context of the contents we have proposed.
How Lavender, the AI used by Israel, works
The documentary talks about telephone tapping systems and telephone spying devices, such as Homeland, or tracking systems used by the Israeli army to locate and learn when a presumed Hamas militant returns to his home, such as Where’s Daddy?, and then there is the best-known system, namely Lavender, a system based on artificial intelligence designed to identify and report as potential attack targets all presumed members of the military wings of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
According to the investigation, the Lavender software examines the data that a mass surveillance system would have accumulated on a large part of the millions of residents of the Gaza Strip, enormous intelligence archives fed by photographs, telephone contacts, geolocation, social media profiling, and then estimates, person by person, how plausible militancy in the armed wing of Hamas or the PIJ is. Once the suspicious profiles have been identified, the system compiles lists of targets that the officers validate and at that point the targeted air raid is launched. The result is an algorithmic classification system designed to make military actions in the field more efficient and powerful. The result is a ranking: the system assigns a value between 1 and 100 to almost every inhabitant of Gaza, which measures the probability that he or she is a militiaman.
Lavender, they say, is trained on the profiles of militants already registered and from their training data the machine extracts the recurring traits that distinguish them, and then searches for them in the rest of the population. The more incriminating elements the system recognizes in a person, the higher the score it assigns. Among the numerous parameters capable of increasing the score attributed to an individual, mention is made of the presence in a WhatsApp chat which also includes a known militant, or the habit of changing cell phones every few months, as well as changing addresses frequently.
Twenty seconds to a target
The green light for the automatic use of Lavender’s lists arrived a couple of weeks after the outbreak of the war following the attacks of 7 October 2023. The army, the sources say, had only needed a manual check on a few hundred targets chosen at random and nine times out of ten the system had correctly recognized a Hamas affiliate.
From that moment, according to the sources, the operators were essentially asked to treat Lavender’s indication as a decision already taken, with no longer the obligation to reconstruct its logic or intelligence data at its origin. One of the sources says he dedicated about twenty seconds to checking each bomb target marked by Lavender, just enough time to make sure it was a person.
In the early stages of the war, Israeli officials could adopt the lists generated by the system without having to reconstruct the reasons or verify the initial intelligence data. Their task was thus reduced to ratifying the machine’s choices, despite the fact that the internal test cited by the sources had estimated a margin of error close to 10% and could also indicate people with weak, or no, ties to armed groups.
The pressure for new goals and the death toll
The raids reached the targets within the home, mostly at night and with family members present. The result, the result of the program’s choices, is thousands of dead Palestinians, mostly women, children and people in many cases unrelated to the fighting, especially in the first weeks of the war.
In that initial phase, two sources report, the army tolerated up to 15-20 civilian victims for each low-ranking Hamas militiaman reported by Lavender, while to hit a single high-ranking officer it had agreed, on several occasions, to sacrifice over 100 of them. Another of the data disputed by the IDF
According to reconstructions, the push towards automation was the incessant demand for new targets and more. One of the sources explains that «On a day without targets (whose score was sufficient to authorize an attack), we attacked with a lower threshold. We were constantly under pressure: “Give us more goals.” They were actually yelling at us. We finished killing our targets very quickly.” With a lower threshold set, the system classified more people as targets; According to four sources, at an early stage Lavender went as far as naming 37,000 Palestinian people as potential targets.
According to a study published in The Lancet Global Health in February 2026, between 7 October 2023 and 5 January 2025 in the Gaza Strip there were an estimated 75,200 deaths from violent causes, among these 22,800 were children and young people under 18 years of age, 16,600 women aged between 18 and 64 years, 2,870 people over 64 years of age and 32,900 men aged between 18 and 64. Within the statistical study, women, children and the elderly collectively made up 56.2% of violent deaths, for a total of 42,200 deaths. The estimate comes from the first independent study based on a representative survey of the population of Gaza and the methodology was subsequently the subject of a scientific debate in the pages of the same journal.
The data reported by the UN, starting from the numbers provided by the Ministry of Health of Gaza and with unverified figures, speak of over 73,000 deaths recorded by June 2026. The UNICEF data, however, report as of 30 June 2026 at least 21,700 children killed since October 2023 and around 45,000 injured, and those of Save the Children speak of at least 21,000 children killed and of a still unknown number of minors buried under the rubble. It is estimated that over 800,000 children are displaced and 7,000 separated from their families.
