I went to see NAZA last week. In case you haven’t heard yet, NAZA is a documentary on the Israeli machinery of mass killing in Gaza. It draws a picture of this machinery by interviewing 24 Israeli who work(ed) for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The interviewees describe how the machinery of killing Palestinians in Gaza works and relies on AI. Israel is able to listen to the phone conversations and read phone messages of people living in Gaza. It uses that information to guess who works for Hamas, and where those people might be. It then bombs the houses of those AI-identified targets, and in that process allows their families or anyone else in the house also to be killed, hence the title of the film: NAZA means ‘collateral damage’. “20 NAZA” then means that the Israeli military accepts that there will be 20 other people as collateral damage for the attempted elimination of one (presumed) member of Hamas. The numbers mentioned in the film vary – I recall the numbers 15 and 20, but also one situation where “500 NAZA” allegedly was approved by the IDF.

The film is deeply disturbing for various reasons. One is to see the use of AI in this genocide, and the mistakes it inevitably makes (a house is bombed because the phone of a target is there, assuming that means the target is asleep; but since the target left his phone before leaving the house, his entire family is murdered, but the target is not). Another one is the evil actions the IDF takes – such as when the interviewees describe that at some point, a mental line is drawn in north-Gaza, whereby anyone who crosses that line will be killed. Civilians have never been informed of that line, and have to find out by trial and error. The dogs know about the line, since they wait until they hear shooting, so that they can then go and eat the murdered Palestinian (bodies are not taken away). [click to continue…]