NAZA: Film exposing systematic killing in Gaza gets record 24-minute standing ovation at Venice

The film features testimony from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers about the systems behind Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza NAZA film directors Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham attend a photocall at the 83rd International Venice Film Festival at Venice Lido in Italy, on 10 September 2026 (Stefano Rellandini/AFP) Published date: 10 September 2026 20:31 BST | Last update: 9 sec ago A documentary examining the Israeli military systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza received a record-breaking standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday. NAZA, directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, drew a record-breaking 24-and-a-half-minute standing ovation at its world premiere, the longest at Venice, according to Variety. The reception surpassed the 22-minute ovation given last year to Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, which tells the story of the six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in January 2024. Members of the Venice audience held Palestinian flags during the applause, while Abraham and Szor, who were visibly emotional, were embraced by the film’s executive producer, The Zone of Interest director, Jonathan Glazer. Online, the documentary received heavy praise from festival-goers and many activists. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters 24 Israeli soldiers sit on Tel Aviv rooftops, sharing how they killed entire families, thousands of people, in Gaza. These testimonies appear in NAZA, a film that premiers in Venice today. Here are the directors, explaining why they made the film:https://t.co/WOKWUTnbcK — Haggai Matar (@Ha_Matar) September 10, 2026 Comparisons to The Zone of Interest were hard to miss on social media. Like Glazer’s film, NAZA is mainly focused on the bureaucratic machinery that allows mass killing to become routine - a system of calculations, procedures and euphemisms that can make atrocity appear administrative. #venezia83 NAZA is like a doc spin-off of The Zone of Interest where the Nazis take a break from their chilling routine and start telling to the camera what they did, how they did it and how much they enjoyed it. Made my stomach churn. Zionism really is sickening. — Lorenzo Ciorcalo (@rotovisor) September 10, 2026 The documentary was filmed secretly at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv and features interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers, most of them military intelligence officers who took part in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Writing in +972 Magazine ahead of the premiere, Abraham and Szor said the film was intended to expose a system rather than isolated abuses, focusing on “orders, policies, and patterns of operation”. They said the testimony led them to conclude that the mass killing of Palestinian civilians was not merely a byproduct of the war but “a premeditated, calculated, and intentional act”. The filmmakers said they sought testimony from soldiers who conducted surveillance, assessed how many civilians were likely to be killed in particular homes, and approved strikes, adding that those first-hand accounts would make the events in Gaza difficult to deny. The film's title refers to a Hebrew military acronym for “collateral damage”, used in the film to describe estimates of civilians expected to be killed in a strike. Abraham and Szor said the term obscures both the military’s advance knowledge of likely civilian deaths and the nature of the campaign itself. According to the film’s official synopsis, NAZA documents in detail “the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza”. Abraham and Szor were two of the four directors behind No Other Land, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2025. NAZA, produced by the Guardian and James Wilson’s JW Films, is the only documentary competing for the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice festival. Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.