New documentary film about Israeli military surveillance in Gaza shown in Venice

After last year's most harrowing and heartbreaking Venice film, "Hind Rajab. The Voice from Gaza" - about a little Palestinian girl's desperate phone call before she is killed by Israeli soldiers - comes another harrowing documentary about the war in Gaza.

British "Naza", which was added late in the Golden Lion competition, is directed by the Israeli reporter and director duo Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. With powerful testimony from within Israel's military intelligence, the film depicts the structures and technology behind the systematic killing of Palestinian civilians. The same directors are also behind the Oscar-winning documentary "No other land", about the struggle between Palestinians, settlers and the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank, where violence has escalated brutally since that film was made.

"Naza" revolves around revelations that have already been previously, among other things, published in The Guardian. The British newspaper has also co-produced the film together with "The zone of interest" director Jonathan Glazer. The title refers, according to The Guardian, to an Israeli acronym for estimated collateral damage in connection with bombing raids, that is, how many civilians the military calculates will die in a given bombing attack with Hamas as the target.

- Much of what we show in the film is known and has been documented in the past, also by Palestinian journalists. But we thought it was important to hear these voices and put them in a context that you can't do in text, says Rachel Szor about the film, which takes place very effectively at night on a roof terrace in Tel Aviv.

The camera switches between digitally anonymized witnesses who allow themselves to be interviewed and windows where you see ordinary Israelis living their lives.

Next to Rachel Szor at the press conference after the film sits Yuval Abraham. He adds:

- As in our previous film "No other land", the goal is to document crimes committed by the Israeli state. By interviewing twenty-four people from the intelligence services and the military, we can depict how mass surveillance has been systematically used to kill Gazans. We felt, as privileged Israelis, a responsibility and a need to take advantage of the opportunities we had to contact inside sources and ask them to tell us.

He also says that it was not really difficult to get answers about how mobile surveillance and mapping of private homes in Gaza were used in the bombings.

- As an investigative reporter, I've learned that sometimes you just have to ask questions, but it's a little surprising that so many still chose to come forward. I think it's about the fact that we only asked straight technical questions about how they worked. Some expressed pangs of conscience and others pride, but for us the important thing was not the individuals but the systematicity of the mass killing itself.

Abraham also believes that the film fills a hole in the vacuum that has arisen between Israeli news media that ignore the war and what is really happening in Gaza.

- While we sit here in Venice, the killing continues in Gaza. 75,000 people, at a rough estimate, have already died. Recently Israeli military bombed a school. We have to break this silence, says Yuval Abraham.