BUENOS AIRES — For months, we have been living with harrowing images from Gaza, amid allegations and accusations of genocide. Images, testimonies, and an incessant flow of information—and yet nothing stops. Gaza has also become this: the repetition of unbearable scenes that we see again and again, without their accumulation seeming sufficient to interrupt the machinery that produces them. 

But in recent weeks, a film burst onto the scene at the 2026 Venice International Film Festival and received an ovation lasting nearly half an hour. It is NAZA, by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two Israeli filmmakers who construct the film from a singular vantage point: testimonies emerging from within Israel’s own military and intelligence apparatus. The film brings together 24 military and intelligence sources and was made over the course of three years.

The question then shifts: what does it mean to look from the inside? Filmed at night, on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, NAZA enters what generally remains off screen: the systems, calculations, and decisions that precede the bombing of Gaza and the mass deaths of Palestinian civilians. And that calculation has a name: NAZA. But NAZA did not originate with this film. Nor did it originate with this war. To understand what it means, we have to go back in time and enter the history of a procedure developed within the Israeli military apparatus itself.

What does NAZA mean?

NAZA comes from נז״א, an acronym for nezek agavi (נזק אגבי), literally “collateral damage,” an expression incorporated into Israeli military language. In planning certain attacks, the military apparatus makes a prior estimate of the civilian casualties the operation could cause. The so-called “NAZA number” expresses that forecast: how many civilians could die as a consequence of the attack before it is authorized. 

Put simply, the calculation begins with the identification of a target, intelligence about the people who are inside it or in its vicinity, and the anticipated effects of the munition. NAZA, therefore, is neither artificial intelligence nor software: it is a military concept and calculation. New technologies may play a role in identifying and assessing targets, but the term predates them. To trace its origins, we have to go back more than two decades. Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist specializing in intelligence, explains in Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations that during the Second Intifada, civilian deaths caused in targeted killing operations began to be referred to as nezek agavi, “collateral damage,” an expression that over time was condensed into the acronym NAZA.

From inside the system

Retired lieutenant colonel and former Israeli Military Intelligence member Sarit Zehavi says that nearly twenty years ago she took part in developing procedures designed to warn and monitor the evacuation of civilian populations, as well as in target-approval processes. Her public intervention is particularly revealing in relation to one of the figures associated with NAZA: 500. Zehavi maintains that “NAZA 500” does not mean an automatic authorization to kill five hundred civilians, but rather a prior estimate of potential harm that should lead to measures to reduce it through evacuations, changes in munitions, or even cancellation of the attack.

But the problem posed by NAZA goes beyond the existence of the calculation itself: what happens when the number of civilians expected to die increases and the attack is nevertheless authorized? The question took on another dimension after October 7, 2023. An investigation by The New York Times said that the Israeli military loosened certain rules of engagement and, in some operations, allowed the risk of killing up to 20 civilians even when targeting lower-ranking combatants. The procedure, however, predates this period. Testimonies from Israeli soldiers collected by Breaking the Silence after the 2014 Gaza offensive describe categories of nezek agavi—collateral damage—classified into levels 0, 1, and 2. One of those testimonies makes a fundamental point: those levels did not count buildings or material damage. They counted human lives.

NAZA is not the only mechanism involved in target selection. In recent years, other tools used by Israeli intelligence have become known. Habsora (The Gospel) processes large amounts of information to help identify possible physical targets, such as buildings or infrastructure. Lavender focuses on individuals, generating assessments of their possible links to armed organizations. And Where’s Daddy? - the name attributed by intelligence sources to a tracking system - was reportedly used to locate previously identified individuals, including when they were in their homes. NAZA serves a different function: it estimates the anticipated collateral damage before an attack. It does not determine who the target is, but how many civilians could be affected by striking it. These tools do not necessarily operate together or in every operation, but they reveal different stages of the same architecture: identify, locate, calculate the damage, and decide whether to strike.

Designing death

The precedent appears in This Is How We Fought in Gaza: Soldiers’ Testimonies and Photographs from Operation “Protective Edge” (2014), a report published in 2015 by the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence (Shovrim Shtika), which brings together testimonies from more than sixty Israeli soldiers and officers who took part in Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Among them, testimony 109 is particularly revealing. At the end, the interviewer asks whether that collateral damage also included material destruction. The answer is no: the levels referred exclusively to human lives. NAZA therefore begins long before a bomb falls on Gaza. It begins in that space cinema can almost never show: a room, a screen, a set of data, a number, and someone who ultimately decides. What we will later see as an image—a destroyed building, bodies, survivors—had already existed before in another form: as a calculation. Perhaps that is where the power of the title and the film lies: bringing into the frame what had remained off screen. Behind the abstraction of “collateral damage,” behind every level and every number, lies something that technical language turns into a figure: human lives.