“NAZA” and Israel’s History of Automated Warfare

On July 22, 2002, an Israeli Air Force pilot dropped a one-ton bomb on a block of apartments, four stories tall, in the Karkash neighborhood of Gaza City. The target was Sheikh Salah Shehadeh, one of the founders of Hamas’s Izzedine al-Qassem brigades. The operation flattened the residential building he called home, killing him, his aide, his wife, three sons, and nine other civilians; 150 more were injured. It was the latest outcome of a relatively new Israeli military strategy adopted at the height of the second intifada: aerial assassinations.

In Israel, the carnage set off a wave of dissent among Air Force pilots. Some had begun to question what, exactly, the air strikes were achieving. For months, Palestinian testimonies from the West Bank and Gaza, reprinted in major global newspapers, had telegraphed horrific scenes: shrapnel slicing through the torsos of bystanders; students taken out while exiting their school. The operation that day in June was, however, a tipping point. Twenty-seven IDF pilots penned a letter refusing to play a part in operations they deemed “illegal and immoral.” Thousands more rallied in support. It was the first coordinated protest among Israeli pilots against such policies in the occupied Palestinian territories. It was also the last.

NAZA, a new documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli half of the team behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land, helps elucidate why, offering a portrait of the technological war machine that developed in the years since. Composed of interviews with anonymous reservists and officers from Israeli units responsible for planning and coordinating air strikes, the film digs into how Israel’s military carried out one of the most destructive air campaigns in modern history in the weeks following October 7, 2023. The documentary’s name is not a combination of “Nazi” and “Gaza” as some reviews have insinuated, but rather taken from the Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. Previous reporting on the film has focused on the dystopian array of machine-learning technologies used to kill Palestinians—one officer calls Israel’s air war the “perfect use of AI.” Less remarked upon, however, though no less consequential, is how NAZA showcases this arsenal’s political effects on the country’s liberal camps: how Israel’s embrace of automated warfare has made policies that once seemed exceptionally cruel, like intentionally killing dozens of innocents as they sleep in their beds, feel routine to the intelligence officers who helped coordinate Israeli air strikes in Gaza. And with them, how ideologies once relegated to the margins of political discourse have become mainstream.

For those who have been paying attention to reporting on Israeli military operations in Gaza for the last three years, NAZA’s revelations are not exactly new. Palestinians in Gaza have been documenting the astronomical toll of these air strikes since October 2023. Abraham and others have also reported on the operational details, like how the army hacks children’s phones with spyware to kill a Hamas operative and his family and military lawyers sign off on these operations. What is new with NAZA, though, is the way the film articulates these points: through testimonies from secular, ostensibly liberal young Israelis who served in elite military units. The film’s subjects sit on Tel Aviv rooftops, describing how they helped destroy Gaza from a distance, with the click of a button. “Fun” is how one officer describes the work of coordinating air strikes that kill families sleeping in their homes. “I understand how a man can blow someone up and go home to his degree in clinical psychology,” another officer admits. “It was like a video game,” still another tells Abraham. “Everything was done remotely.”

It would be amiss to view these technological developments in a vacuum; they are part of Israel’s shift to the far right over the last few decades. The IDF began to adapt these systems en masse in the 2000s. The land, sea, and air blockade that began after Hamas was voted into power in 2006 spurred a dramatic change in the form of Israel’s military rule over the Gaza Strip. Israel’s army poured resources into expanding the use of drones, cell phone tracking systems, and wiretaps prototyped and refined during the Second Intifada. The idea was to leverage new military technologies to maintain Israeli control without deploying boots on the ground. Intelligence units—whose conscripts were often plucked from Israel’s affluent urban centers—tracked down members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad by listening to their cell phones, hacking into their e-mails, or poring over aerial images of Palestinian cities, compiling them into long lists of military targets for drone or fighter jet pilots to bomb.

The effects on the ground were gruesome and bloody, but the technology at the disposal of airforce and intelligence units meant that many involved—unlike their compatriots patrolling the West Bank—were increasingly shielded from its effects. The names of targets were displayed in spreadsheets, the coordinates of their mobile phones as blinking dots on a virtual map, and they were killed by munitions launched from armed drones, hovering hundreds of feet in the air. “It reminds me of a Play Station game,” one intelligence operative told a Haaretz reporter after Operation Cast Lead back in 2009, a 22-day assault on the Gaza strip that killed 1,400 Palestinians, an unprecedented number. “You hear cheers in the war room after you see on the screens that the missile hit a target.”

Though Operation Cast Lead was roundly condemned by institutions like the United Nations and International Criminal Court, following the event the Israeli military only set about making its surveillance and targeting arsenal more potent. Israeli conscripts developed predictive algorithms to synthesize the reams of data taken from the Palestinian territories, where Israel’s control of the telecommunications infrastructure and airspace give soldiers panoptic powers. NAZA describes one named Lavender, which culls through automatically translated and transcribed calls, text messages, social-media content, and location history stored on phones to assign Palestinians in Gaza scores, which, in turn, determine whether someone is a military “target” or a member of Hamas or Islamic Jihad’s armed wings.

Technological innovations often go hand in hand with political ones. With time, long lists of algorithmically generated military targets helped make wars on Gaza more frequent and gruesome: By 2021 they had become an annual event. Israel’s growing right-wing camps were galvanized by these spectacular displays of military force. Politicians like Benjamin Netanuyahu and Itamar Ben Gvir boasted to their supporters of expanding lists of Palestinians killed, who had taken to shouting “death to Arabs” at rallies. Meanwhile, the daily violence necessary to maintain Israel’s occupation in the West Bank, with settler vigilantes killing Palestinians outside their homes and burning their agricultural lands, armed soldiers searching high school students’ phones at makeshift checkpoints or raiding homes in the dead of night, allowed a militant strain of Jewish supremacy to creep from the margins of Israeli political discourse into the mainstream.

Among Israel’s shrinking left-wing camp, the same arsenal helped the possibility of unending military rule disappear from view. Soldiers from Israel’s more liberal constituencies circulated from elite technological units into high-paying jobs at multinational technology firms setting up shop in central Israel. They might have gotten their start using spyware to hack into Palestinians’ phones or tracking a reaper drone as it zeroed in on a house in Gaza city, but on LinkedIn the work was reframed as “user experience research” or “development operations.” Though violence gestated a few miles away, as settlers torched Palestinian agricultural lands in the West Bank and air strikes pummeled Gaza, an influx of foreign capital transformed cities like Tel Aviv into hermetically sealed environments.

That seemed to change on October 7, 2023. The atrocities Hamas inflicted were an unprecedented national trauma, one that Israelis from across its ever-narrowing political spectrum desired to avenge. The technological arsenal detailed in NAZA allowed the army to act with unrestrained force on that day. One officer in the film describes how, though Lavender had a 15 percent error rate, soldiers were instructed to use it to mark even the lowest-ranking Hamas operatives out for assassination. Another describes using a program called “Where’s Daddy?” that alerted him when targets returned to their family homes by automatically flagging messages from their children. A third explains how this arsenal allowed the army to systematically kill hundreds of Hamas operatives as they slept alongside their wives and children at night.

On camera, the officers Abraham interviews sketch out the user-friendly interfaces they used to coordinate destruction. Some had no qualms about the unprecedented bloodshed, while others explain how specific military policies helped rationalize skyrocketing civilian casualties. As various investigations have shown, directives from the upper echelons of Israel’s government to wage war without restraint meant that military lawyers authorized strikes that could kill anywhere from tens to hundreds at a time, all in accordance with the army’s flexible interpretations of laws of war.

Reporting by Palestinians in Gaza has long evinced the cost these weapons, and the policies that come with them, exact on their victims. If that was not enough, NAZA now makes the consequences for their perpetrators impossible to ignore. When extraordinarily violent technologies—like spyware, predictive targeting algorithms, and 2,000 pound warheads—become ordinary instruments of military rule and occupation, practices that once seemed abhorrent, like dropping a bomb on a house full of children, become routine. The result is the Israel featured in the documentary: a place where 18-year-old soldiers dispatch drones to blow up houses with families inside of them in between espresso breaks at a shopping mall.

NAZA should be a warning to other countries—if it is not already too late. The United States military forged its AI arsenal through two decades of drone warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and beyond, where the killing of unarmed civilians by pilots sitting on airbases in Nevada was routine. It was released in full force in Iran, as large language models offered up long lists of targets for drones and fighter pilots to strike in operations that left hundreds of civilians dead. Today, many Americans rally behind politicians who champion unrestrained force and expansionist policies, parroting Israel’s own brand of hawkish nationalism. Others simply do not have to think about the gruesome outcomes of their country’s military adventurism, even those who engineer the algorithms now being used to determine where the Pentagon drops bombs.

The protests that rocked Israel back in 2002 were summarily condemned by IDF officials in the months to follow. Speaking to reporters later on that year, Dan Halutz, then the commander of the Israeli Air Force, famously told his soldiers they could “sleep well at night” whilst carrying out aerial strikes in Gaza or the West Bank, even when the mission might entail bombing civilians. They should trust the chain of command, from intelligence analysts who hunted down purported militants to commanders who reviewed the data and dispatched a pilot to kill. “When I release a bomb,” Halutz said, “I feel a light bump to the plane as a result of the bomb’s release. A second later, it’s gone. That’s all. That is what I feel.” NAZA showcases the technical arsenal that helped generations of soldiers heed his advice.