For a full twenty-five minutes after the final frame dissolved, the audience inside Venice's Sala Grande did not sit down. They turned, instead, toward the film-makers — two young Israelis standing somewhere in the gilded dark of the Palazzo del Cinema — and they applauded. The film that had preceded this extraordinary silence was NAZA, an eighty-minute documentary produced by The Guardian, whose very title is drawn from an Israeli military acronym used as a bureaucratic euphemism for the civilians whose deaths are calculated and anticipated before a strike is ever ordered. What makes the film so difficult to dismiss, and so impossible to contain, is that it is narrated entirely in Hebrew by twenty-four anonymised insiders from some of the Israeli military's most elite units.

Intelligence officers and soldiers describe, with remarkable candour and wildly varying registers of remorse, a set of systems — several of them powered by artificial intelligence — that are used to select thousands of targets for strikes, most of them carried out at night and in the midst of family homes. Some of those who speak seem broken by what they describe. Others recall it with something closer to excitement, even pleasure. All roads, however, lead to the same destination: a programme of killing in which the boundary between combatant and civilian had largely ceased to exist, in a war that has now claimed more than 73,000 Palestinian lives.

In New York, where the film is due to open in cinemas from 30 September, anticipation has been building steadily. But in Israel, the reaction has been of an entirely different order. The film's directors — Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — have been accused of treason by right-wing politicians, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to legislate against those he claims "smear" Israeli soldiers. Demonstrators gathered outside Szor's parents' home, where protesters called openly for the death penalty.