At the 83rd Venice International Film Festival in 2026, a documentary titled NAZA — Collateral Civilian Casualty Estimate — was awarded the Special Jury Prize, making it one of the most closely watched films in the festival’s main competition.

According to the official Venice Film Festival programme, NAZA was co-directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. The 80-minute documentary was produced by The Guardian and JW Films.[1]

[Image]
Yuval Abraham [right, second] and Rachel Szor [right, third], directors of NAZA.
Photo credit: HK01 / Hong Kong CI

The title NAZA is itself one of the most disturbing elements of the film. It is reportedly derived from terminology used within Israel’s military intelligence system to indicate how many civilians are expected to be killed in a particular airstrike.

In other words, it does not refer to an accidental death after the fact. It refers to a projected human cost that can be estimated, quantified and potentially incorporated into the military decision-making process.

Reporting by The Guardian describes how Israeli military and intelligence personnel interviewed in the documentary discuss a system in which civilian casualties are translated into numbers used in military calculations.[2]

This raises a chilling question: when artificial intelligence can rapidly identify targets, analyse data, calculate probabilities and estimate casualties, does human life risk becoming just another number — like the figures used in international trade, factory production or the allocation of electoral districts?

Yet NAZA goes beyond the question of whether AI can be used to kill.

Its deeper concern is what happens when killing is broken down into data processing, risk assessment, target identification and cost calculation. Does death gradually lose its ethical weight and become merely another parameter in a system?

The film features anonymous testimony from 24 people with experience inside Israel’s military and intelligence establishment. They describe how AI and related intelligence systems were allegedly involved in target identification and military decision-making during the war in Gaza.

The identities and safety of the interviewees have been protected. Some of their testimony cannot be independently verified in the same way as public documents, while the Israeli military has denied or challenged some of the allegations presented in the film. The coexistence of anonymous testimony and official denials makes NAZA not only a documentary about war, but also a film about evidence, truth and the ethics of journalism.[3]

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect is not simply how many people a bomb may kill, but that the number of deaths can apparently be estimated before the bomb is dropped.

According to testimony in the film, some military operations may involve a calculated “collateral” cost of hundreds of civilians. The question therefore becomes more disturbing than “How many people were accidentally killed?”

It becomes: How many innocent lives can be treated as an acceptable price for striking a particular military target?

Traditional war documentaries could not quite ask this question in the same way, because there was no AI.

In the past, we saw soldiers, tanks, aircraft, explosions and bodies on screen. NAZA turns its camera towards a less visible battlefield — offices, intelligence systems, algorithms, databases and decision-making procedures.

It shifts our understanding of war from violence on the battlefield to violence embedded in a system.

At the very moment someone on the other side of the world may be killed or permanently injured by what appears to be a distant military decision, the people designing or operating the system may be sitting thousands of kilometres away in an air-conditioned office — drinking freshly brewed coffee, exchanging affectionate messages with a partner on their phones, or telling their children about a Mediterranean holiday during the next school break.

For the people operating the system, the battlefield can become an abstraction.

At the site of the attack, however, fear, injury and death are experienced by real human beings — people who, only seconds earlier, may have had no reason to imagine that they, their families or their communities were about to face catastrophe.

An algorithm has no conscience.

It can calculate distance, recognise images, analyse patterns and improve the probability of hitting a target. But it cannot, by itself, answer questions such as: What is the value of a child’s life?

Or: How many innocent people inside another person’s home would make that target no longer acceptable to attack?

The most fundamental question is this:

Can human life ever be legitimately converted into an acceptable cost figure?

The two directors of NAZA are not newcomers to documentary filmmaking on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They were also among the co-directors of the 2024 documentary No Other Land, made by Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers. The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2025.[4]

No Other Land placed its camera on land, homes and the daily lives of people facing displacement. NAZA takes us one step further behind the curtain of war:

Who decides what becomes a target?

Who calculates the cost?

Who translates human death into numbers?

And who bears the irreversible human consequences behind those numbers?

There is, of course, something remarkably clear and convenient about such a system.

“Collateral civilian casualties” become data. Once there is a number, there can be a code. Whether the person is a combatant, a mother preparing to send her children to school, a father putting on his tie before leaving for work, or an elderly couple stepping into a lift for an afternoon walk, each can become, within the logic of the system, simply another figure within an “acceptable” range.

Death becomes a “necessary risk”.

But once we begin speaking of risk in administrative, technical and statistical language, where does the analysis ultimately lead?

To politics.

Across ethnicities, religions and nationalities, the old logic remains disturbingly familiar: better to wrong others than to be wronged oneself.

The sentiment is morally repugnant. But if ethical responsibility can be diluted by saying, “That is simply how the system calculates it”, then one must ask: after two thousand years of civilisation since the age of the Three Kingdoms, have we really progressed beyond this logic?

Consider what happened in the United States during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

In the early hours of Nov 9, 1979, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was awakened after the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) reported that the Soviet Union had launched a massive nuclear attack against the United States.

Initial reports indicated about 200 incoming missiles. A subsequent call revised the figure to approximately 2,200.

Brzezinski was preparing to call President Carter and recommend a response when a third call arrived: the warning was false.

An investigation found that simulated data from a nuclear-war training exercise had inadvertently been fed into the NORAD computer system, generating a false warning.[5]

A technical error had brought the world dangerously close to the possibility of nuclear war.

The incident carries a warning that remains relevant in the age of artificial intelligence.

When human judgement is increasingly delegated to systems, a false signal can become a real-world decision.

And when the consequences involve human life, an error in the system is not simply an error in data.

It can become an irreversible human tragedy.

So the question raised by NAZA is not merely whether artificial intelligence can calculate more accurately, identify targets more quickly or reduce operational uncertainty.

The more difficult question is this:

If AI can calculate the human cost of war, can it also say no to the algorithm of war?

And perhaps an even more important question remains for those who design, authorise and operate such systems:

When the number on the screen represents a human life, who is responsible for saying that the number is already one too many?

[1] Biennale Cinema 2026 | NAZA

[2]NAZA review – Israeli intelligence officers cast chilling light on civilian deaths | Venice film festival | The Guardian

[3] An Israeli documentary on the war in Gaza sets off a firestorm at home after Venice award 

[4] ICA | No Other Land

[5] Knappenberger, B. (Director). (2024). Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War [TV series]. Luminant Media; Netflix.