One computer system works out the probability that a Palestinian is connected to Hamas, another gives a score for how many civilian casualties the Israeli military can accept in an attack on that person.
This is evident in the new documentary "Naza", which deals with Israel's warfare in Gaza. The title carries connotations that are likely deliberate. But the name is also an abbreviation for the Hebrew nezek agavi, or what English speakers call "collateral damage". Civilian casualties, that is.
Here, the regrettably familiar images of Palestinian slain children whose parents cry among the racial masses are essentially absent. Instead, almost the entire film takes place on a rooftop in Tel Aviv, where 24 anonymous people who worked or are working for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are interviewed. You get an insight into an efficient and gamified mass murder machine.
The soldiers don't talk about casualties when they select targets - just the number of "naza". A target could produce anywhere from ten to several hundred naza – one soldier explains that an entire neighborhood was pulverized in hopes of killing one (1) person.
A sense of escape from reality occurs when watching the documentary. The battles are fought from computer screens. Some soldiers say that when 75 percent of a neighborhood in Gaza was evacuated, the computer system turned green, after which they bombed those that remained. They then went out to eat or drink alcohol in Tel Aviv. One soldier simply describes his task as "technical", another says it feels like a "computer game", a third insists it's "fun".
The documentary has received criticism on journalistic grounds. Partly because it relies almost exclusively on anonymous interviews as sources. Partly also for its layout. The Danish Weekendavisen's editor-in-chief Martin Krasnik believes, for example, that context is missing, and that the documentary makers slip between the explanation that Israel accepted the killing of civilians to achieve military goals, and that murdering Palestinians was the intention (1/10). Jan Söderqvist points out in Svenska Dagbladet that the film does not at all comment on Hamas's strategy, which includes dead Palestinians (29/9).
The criticism is not without points. One might add that the very existence of the naza calculations indicates that the Israeli army did not allow or seek the maximum possible killing of Palestinians. At the same time, those things do not overshadow what the documentary actually shows.
And the fact is that its core does not consist of new revelations. Already two years ago, the Israeli site +972 Magazine - with "Naza" director Yuval Abraham as investigative reporter - and The Guardian co-published the information that Israel is using AI models on a large scale to identify targets, and greatly increased the number of civilian deaths that are considered tolerable in connection with attacks against terrorists.
What "Naza" does above all is to turn the words of these computer screen soldiers into flesh and blood people. Show what this means in practice. The total dehumanization that this type of warfare leads to.
In the film, a soldier tells how he sat in a meeting where they discussed whether to try to take Hamas members during the day, when they were training, having meetings, fighting - or at night when they were sleeping in their homes. The latter would be easier, but lead to heavy civilian casualties. Everyone around the table voted to kill them at night.
In front of the screens, speaking of naza points, the soldiers hardly notice that they are carrying out mass murders of civilians. Only now and then does reality seep through. A soldier tells how, through a hacked mobile phone, he heard a child crying and a mother messing around in the home seconds before a bomb he sent killed them. Another tells how they bombed several families, believing that a Hamas member was at home. But it was only his mobile phone that was forgotten in the apartment – the civilians were killed for nothing.
A soldier explains in "Naza" how there are bodies everywhere in Gaza, that they don't bury them. What happens to these extinguished lives? The dogs eat them, he explains. There it is lacking. The distance created by screens and computer game-like systems is dying.
