What 25 Minutes of Applause bought Hamas
The applause lasted 25 minutes.
That’s how long the audience at the Venice Film Festival stood and clapped for NAZA, a documentary that accuses Israel of using artificial intelligence to knowingly and systematically massacre Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Twenty-five minutes.
Longer than most sermons. Longer than it takes to drive from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Long enough for the film’s directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, to stand and absorb wave after wave of ovation for a film built almost entirely on the word of 24 anonymous sources, their faces blurred and their voices altered, whose ranks and roles no one outside the production can verify.
I’ve read the arguments circling this film all week, and there are plenty. The anonymous sources can’t be cross-examined. Their ranks and identities can’t even be verified. The film alleges a strike killed 500 civilians, a number that even Hamas, in three years of war, never claimed. Israeli military experts have explained repeatedly, in public forums the filmmakers apparently didn’t attend, that the AI systems in question are used to narrow targeting and reduce civilian harm, not expand it, and that no algorithm in Israel’s arsenal has ever pulled a trigger. Every strike still passes through a human commander and then through the IDF’s legal division, a review that isn’t merely policy but written into Israeli law. And the film includes not one interview, not one rebuttal, from anyone who could offer the other side, thus presenting a completely biased narrative.
Those are the technical arguments. They’re worth knowing. But there’s a simpler case, one that doesn’t need transcripts or a legal degree to follow.
Ask the Obvious Question
So what’s simpler? Common sense.
If genocide were truly Israel's aim in Gaza, if the goal really were to inflict civilian casualties in indiscriminate, genocidal numbers, why would the IDF need artificial intelligence to do it? Gaza is one of the most densely packed strips of land on earth. Civilians are everywhere, heavily concentrated. Moreover, Hamas has openly admitted that it treats its own population as human shields, thus civilians deliberately thrust into the firing line. To put it bluntly, in a place like that, in a situation like that, killing civilians requires no effort whatsoever. What requires effort—immense and sustained effort—is not killing them.
And let’s not pretend Israel lacks the capability to have done exactly what the film alleges. The IDF could have leveled all 141 square miles of Gaza in an afternoon on October 8, 2023. The war, as far as military objectives go, could have been over before it began. It would have cost far fewer soldiers. It would have cost far less money. Israel didn’t do that. Again, let’s not pretend it’s because the world would have condemned them for it. The world condemns Israel regardless. Whether the accusation is true or invented has never mattered much. Jewish history has taught this lesson again and again: when the blood libel comes—and it always comes—the question was never guilt or innocence but rather how guilty.
Israel knew that going in. It knew it would be called guilty no matter what it did. And knowing that, knowing the verdict was already written, Israel chose anyway to spend its own soldiers’ lives and its own treasury protecting the population of an enemy sworn to its destruction.
None of this makes Israel a sinless ideal. Armies, soldiers, humans make mistakes. That is part and parcel of flawed humanity. But there’s a vast, unbridgeable difference between a nation that errs while trying to protect civilians and a nation that errs because it never tried. If the IDF were the bloodthirsty machine NAZA depicts, there would not be a single Palestinian left in Gaza. That fact alone should end the conversation. It doesn’t, because facts rarely do these days.
What the Numbers Actually Say
Results tell the truth that propaganda tries to bury, so consider what the results in Gaza actually show, as compiled by the research organization RealityCheck.
Most of the casualties, according to Hamas’s own demographic figures, were males of military age, not the women and children the terror group’s public messaging insists made up the overwhelming share of the dead. Israeli military data puts the civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio well below historical norms for urban warfare, a claim corroborated, not contradicted, by Hamas’s own figures on who its dead actually were.
Meanwhile, a peer-reviewed analysis of Israeli aid delivery data found that between January and April 2024, Israel facilitated enough food to supply Gaza’s population with an average of roughly 3,200 to 3,300 calories per person per day, well above the 2,100-calorie standard set by the Sphere humanitarian guidelines for crisis response. That’s not the whole war, and aid access tightened badly in other stretches, but during that studied period it stands as real, documented evidence of an army going out of its way to feed the very population it’s accused of trying to starve into extinction.
None of that supports a war crimes case, let alone a genocide case, under any honest reading of international law. Which may explain why Ireland, formally intervening in support of the genocide case against Israel, has actually petitioned the court to redefine the word “genocide” so that it can be made to fit. Tell me you don’t have a case without telling me you don’t have a case.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, they say. So, picture two people standing side by side: one carrying extra weight, the other built like an Olympic athlete, RealityCheck explains. You don’t need their training logs to know which one has been doing the work. You can see it. In the same way, you don’t need to fact-check every frame of NAZA to know the truth about this war. The results already told the story before the film was ever made.
A Voice the Filmmakers Chose to Skip
Sarit Zehavi knows that story better than most. She helped found the IDF unit responsible for warning enemy populations before a strike and for tracking whether they evacuated. She spent years building the target approval process the film opens with, and she says plainly that the filmmakers never called her.
If they had, she shared in an interview titled The Truth Behind the Film “Naza”: What the Filmmakers Deliberately Missed, she would have told them that the chart shown at the start of NAZA isn’t a killing chart. Instead, it’s a planning chart, used to decide whether a strike happens at all, who has authority to approve it and under what conditions. When a projected casualty number appears in that process, it’s not a green light but a trigger to reduce the number, whether through an evacuation warning, a switch to precision munitions or scrapping the strike altogether.
Hamas and Hezbollah build their infrastructure under homes and inside civilian buildings for a reason: they’re counting on Israel striking blind and killing hundreds. Israel refuses to give them that. Entire intelligence desks exist for no other purpose than tracking evacuation rates so a strike can be called off if needed.
Zehavi doesn’t pretend the system is flawless. Intelligence is never complete, and in every war zone, mistakes happen and civilians die who shouldn’t have. But she’s clear about what separates Israel from its enemies: intent. Hamas and Hezbollah state openly that killing Israeli civilians is the goal. Israel states, just as openly, that it isn’t, and then builds legal teams, warning systems and entire intelligence divisions to prove it.
The filmmakers had access to someone who helped build that system, in her own words, without hiding her face. They chose twenty-four blurred strangers instead. One wonders why.
The Question Underneath the Question
The Venice Film Festival likes to present itself as a temple of art and conscience. It’s worth remembering that in September 1940, this same festival welcomed the world premiere of Jud Süss, a notorious Nazi propaganda film that twisted a historical story to demonize Jewish people and helped pave the road to the Holocaust. It premiered to rave reviews. That wasn’t an isolated case. Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia and the Nazi film Heimkehr both took Venice’s top honor as well. A prestigious stage has never been proof of a righteous verdict. Sometimes it's proof of exactly the opposite.
Scripture is not vague about how all of this ends. The nations gather against Jerusalem in the last days until He Himself comes down to defend them and crush what stands against them. We are watching, in real time, a global audience stand and applaud a film accusing the Jewish state of the very crime its enemies are actually attempting.
You can spend your energy poking holes in every anonymous testimony and misquoted statistic in NAZA, and you’d be right to. But this was never really about the film. It’s about which story you’re willing to believe when the applause is loud and the evidence is quiet.
Israel has already answered that question, in the results, in the aid, in the Palestinian civilians alive in Gaza today.
The question now is which story you’ll stand for.
Related Resources
Discover Your Purpose and God’s Heart For You
In today's divided, turbulent world, it's essential for the Church to rediscover God's heart. Our free e-book, authored by a seasoned expert with three decades of experience in Israel, delves deep into the teachings of Jesus (Yeshua) to reveal God’s principles of love and purpose. Learn how embracing these truths can bring significance and impact to your life, even amidst chaos. Subscribe now to receive your free copy and embark on a journey of transformation.