For twenty-five minutes, the audience at the Venice Film Festival stood and applauded. The film that earned that sustained, extraordinary ovation is called Naza — a word drawn from the Hebrew military acronym for "collateral damage" — and it is now at the centre of one of the bitterest cultural and political controversies of the year. Its co-directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who won an Academy Award last year for their documentary No Other Land, are being threatened with the loss of their Israeli citizenship by Culture Minister Miki Zohar, who has accused them of treason against the state. The film, which runs to eighty minutes and was produced by the British newspaper The Guardian, features conversations with twenty-four unidentified Israeli military and intelligence officers.

These anonymous insiders describe, in considerable detail, the AI-powered targeting systems that were used by the Israel Defense Forces to conduct its bombardment of Gaza after the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023, in which approximately 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage. One officer, according to the film's synopsis, describes approval being granted for an operation that would kill 500 people in order to eliminate a single human target — an allegation the IDF has flatly denied. The human cost that forms the backdrop to Naza is staggering. More than 73,000 Palestinians, among them over 20,000 children, have been killed in the IDF's subsequent campaign, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry — figures which the United Nations regards as reliable.

Minister Zohar, writing to Israel's Interior Ministry, invoked the country's Citizenship Law, which permits revocation of nationality for a breach of allegiance, though the measure has almost never been applied in practice.