The 83rd Venice Film Festival made global headlines Thursday when a groundbreaking documentary investigating Israeli military systems responsible for mass civilian deaths in Gaza received the longest standing ovation in the event’s history.
Directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, NAZA drew a rapturous 24-and-a-half-minute ovation from the festival audience following its world premiere, according to entertainment industry outlet Variety. This unprecedented reception shattered the previous record of 22 minutes, set just one year prior for Kaouther Ben Hania’s *The Voice of Hind Rajab* — another work centered on the Gaza crisis, which chronicles the killing of six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab by Israeli forces in January 2024.
As applause echoed through the theater, audience members unfurled Palestinian flags in a show of solidarity. A visibly moved Abraham and Szor were embraced by executive producer Jonathan Glazer, the acclaimed director of *The Zone of Interest*, a Oscar-winning film that examined the bureaucratic banality of atrocity during the Holocaust.
Online reaction to the premiere was immediate and intense, with festival attendees and human rights activists praising the documentary across social media platforms. The core of NAZA draws from rare, confidential testimonies: 24 Israeli soldiers, most serving in military intelligence units that participated in the Gaza campaign, agreed to share their experiences on camera. Filmed in secret overnight on Tel Aviv rooftops to protect the interviewees, the accounts lay bare how soldiers systematically planned and carried out operations that killed thousands of people, including entire Palestinian families.
Writing for the Israeli-based independent outlet +972 Magazine ahead of the premiere, Abraham and Szor outlined their core purpose: rather than calling out isolated acts of abuse by individual soldiers, the film seeks to expose the institutional framework that enables mass killing. “We focus on orders, policies, and patterns of operation,” they explained. From their analysis of the collected testimonies, the co-directors reached a searing conclusion: the mass death of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is not an unintended side effect of military conflict, but “a premeditated, calculated, and intentional act.”
The soldiers interviewed in the film occupy key roles in the Israeli military’s strike approval process: they carry out surveillance on targeted residential structures, calculate projected civilian casualty numbers for individual home strikes, and sign off on deadly attacks. The filmmakers argue that these first-hand accounts eliminate any plausible deniability around the scale and intentionality of civilian deaths in Gaza.
The film’s title itself carries deliberate meaning: NAZA is a Hebrew military acronym for “collateral damage,” the term routinely used by the Israeli military to refer to projected civilian deaths in planned strikes. Abraham and Szor emphasize that this clinical euphemism intentionally obscures two critical facts: that military leadership knew in advance how many civilians would die in each strike, and that the campaign targeting civilian populations is a deliberate, policy-level choice.
The documentary’s official synopsis underscores this focus, stating that NAZA offers a granular, documented account of “the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”
This is not the first high-profile work for the directing duo: Abraham and Szor were two of the four co-directors behind *No Other Land*, which took home the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2025. Produced in partnership with the Guardian and James Wilson’s JW Films, NAZA is the only documentary selected to compete for the festival’s top honor, the Golden Lion, this year.
On social media, observers quickly drew parallels between NAZA and Glazer’s *The Zone of Interest*, noting both works center on the bureaucratic systems that normalize mass atrocity through routine, procedural calculation and dehumanizing language. One social media commentator summarized the connection as NAZA being a documentary spin-off of Glazer’s Oscar-winning film, with the added layer of perpetrators directly describing their actions on camera, a choice that many observers described as deeply visceral and unsettling.