Twenty-five minutes. That is how long a Venice audience stood and clapped on Thursday night for two Israelis who came to tell Europe that their own country kills children on purpose. It was the longest ovation in the festival's history. Hamas has spent decades and fortunes trying to win the West's sympathy, and it has never managed a reception like that. It didn't need to. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor delivered it for free, with subtitles.
Their film is called NAZA, and the pair stood through the applause looking drawn and solemn. Solemnity suits them. It is the house expression of people who have discovered that the surest route to a festival crown is to stand on a European stage and indict the country that raised them.
They named the film after a spreadsheet column. NAZA is the Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage, nezek agavi, the estimated number of civilians who may be harmed in a strike. The film presents that number as a smoking gun. It is the opposite. Every lawful army on earth counts expected civilian harm before it fires, because the laws of war require it. Proportionality means weighing military advantage against civilian harm, and you cannot weigh what you refuse to count. The Pentagon has a collateral damage estimation methodology. So does NATO. The IDF says the film rips ordinary proportionality calculations out of context. An army that does this math is obeying the law. An army that didn't would be the war criminal. Abraham and Szor have taken the paperwork of restraint and projected it onto a screen in Venice as a murder ledger, and the room was too busy weeping to notice the trick.
Now look at their witnesses, or rather, try to. There are 24 of them, filmed as black silhouettes on Tel Aviv rooftops, faces hidden, voices scrambled. One says there was "mass killing on an industrial scale." Another claims his unit's mission was to "thwart peace." No names. No faces. No way for anyone in that ovation to test a single word. In Venice, this is called courage. In any court, and in any newsroom that still takes itself seriously, it is called an allegation.
And who vouches for the shadows? The Guardian, which produced the film and then reported on its own film's revelations. It is a remarkable business model: fund the story, cast the story, break the story, and then cover the reaction to the story. Viewers are asked to trust the verification of the one outlet with the most invested in the film's success. That isn't a fact-check. It's the Guardian nodding at itself.
Defenders will point to the most damning numbers in the film, such as the claim, highlighted by one reviewer, that 20 civilian deaths became the norm for strikes on low-level Hamas operatives. That is a brutal rule of engagement, where Israel was fighting for its existence in a war it didn't choose and didn't want. A harsh proportionality threshold in a war against an enemy that lives beneath its own civilians is not extermination. A film that cannot tell the difference between the two is not journalism. It is a verdict looking for a soundtrack.
Abraham and Szor insist the civilian deaths in Gaza were "not a 'tragic byproduct' of a war against Hamas." You can only say that with a straight face if Hamas has been edited down to a cameo. On October 7, Hamas murdered some 1,200 people and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. Then it fought the war it started from inside living rooms, under schools and beneath hospitals, hiding captives in the same neighborhoods it fired from. Every NAZA figure on every Israeli targeting sheet was a number Hamas deliberately made possible. Its entire strategy was to force Israel into exactly that calculation and then sell the result to audiences like the one in Venice. Abraham and Szor have made themselves the sales team.
They chose Tel Aviv rooftops, they explain, to show how life in the city simply goes on while Gaza burns. What a grotesque sentence. Life in Tel Aviv went on so beautifully that its residents spent two years sprinting to stairwells under rocket and missile fire. Its most famous plaza became Hostages Square, where families stood week after week under photographs of their kidnapped children. The skyline behind those silhouettes is not a monument to Israeli indifference. It is a city in mourning, and they used it as a backdrop.
Then comes the part they will deny they did. Their directors' statement says the film forced them to ask the questions of their grandparents' generation: "how does one group of people allow the total dehumanisation of another?" Their executive producer is Jonathan Glazer, who used his 2024 Oscar speech to tie "The Zone of Interest" to Israel's war in Gaza. The critics took the hint immediately. One announced that "Tel Aviv is the Zone of Interest of the 21st century." Another wrote that Israel is imitating Nazi efficiency. And Abraham, asked about the Holocaust imagery, told reporters: "I'm not saying it's the same. I don't think it is."
Of course he isn't. He just hired the man who made the Auschwitz movie, invoked his grandparents' generation, and let Venice finish the sentence. The disclaimer is for the press conference. The Nazi analogy is for the audience.
Szor, not to be outdone, noted that many of the officers came from elite units and sometimes call themselves left-wing, and suggested they "perhaps are the people who are responsible for the most killing." Read that again. The young Israelis who hesitated, who questioned, who came from the most liberal homes in the country, are in her telling its most prolific killers. Rachel Szor has finally located an Israeli more guilty than a settler: one who served with a conscience. There is no Israeli her worldview cannot convict.
Abraham, meanwhile, says Israel will not hold anyone accountable without pressure from the United States and the European Union, and laments that Israel's "wall of denial" is very thick. Translation: Israelis have heard his case and rejected it, so he would like foreign governments to overrule them. The people behind his "wall of denial" are the ones who buried their sons, sat by the phone for news of the hostages and are still rebuilding the kibbutzim that were burned. They argue about this war more fiercely than any festival audience ever will, in their newspapers, their courts and, in a few weeks, their ballot boxes. They are not in denial. They simply don't accept his verdict, and he cannot forgive them for it.
The Golden Lion will be announced Saturday. Sitting on the jury is Kaouther Ben Hania, whose Gaza film "The Voice of Hind Rajab" collected last year's record ovation and the Grand Jury Prize. Whatever the jury decides, the verdict in that hall was delivered before the credits rolled.
NAZA is a prosecution brief with the defense locked out of the room, dressed in the borrowed prestige of Holocaust memory and staged for an audience that had already reached its verdict and wanted two Israelis to sign it.
They signed. Venice stood for twenty-five minutes. And not once, in all that time, did anyone in the Sala Grande ask where Hamas was standing when the number was calculated.
