Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor said they had collected evidence from 24 different Israeli military or intelligence figures who agreed to testify on camera in Tel Aviv as long as their identities were protected.
"We are letting the soldiers and the officers speak about what they did," Abraham told reporters.
"The goal was very simple: we wanted to hear in as much detail as possible, how the systems of killing in Gaza looked like, how they operated."
Their film, "NAZA", draws its name from a euphemism used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that are expected to be killed in an airstrike.
The result of a nearly three-year investigation, it is the only documentary in competition at this year's Venice Film Festival, which wraps up on Saturday.
"NAZA" sees Israeli servicemen and women describe in detail how the mass surveillance of Gaza, where the entire telecoms network is monitored by Israel, was combined with AI technology to identify people to kill.
"The mass surveillance is directly related to the mass killing," Abraham, 31, told reporters.
Israel's bombardment of Gaza has left around 73,500 Palestinians dead and 174,500 wounded since October 2023, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures the United Nations deems reliable.
The pounding of the territory followed an attack on Israel by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, that resulted in the death of 1,219 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
-- Oscar winners --
Along with Palestinians Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, Abraham and Szor won an Oscar in 2025 for their film "No Other Land" about Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank.
Their latest movie has been produced by Britain's Jim Wilson with help from Jonathan Glazer -- the team behind Auschwitz-set Oscar winner "The Zone of Interest" -- as well as Britain's Guardian newspaper.
Abraham and Szor, both investigative journalists, said they hoped it would encourage Western nations to drop their backing for Israel and apply pressure through sanctions.
"Those of us inside Israel and Palestine trying to fight for change, need it," Abraham told reporters. "You are weakening the people inside who are supporting human rights and a political solution by refusing to act."
Israel claims it does not deliberately target civilians in Gaza, accusing Hamas of hiding among the population of the densely packed and besieged territory, where around two million people lived before the war.
But Abraham said he come to the conclusion that Israel's government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was "violating the Genocide Convention of 1948" and was committed to expelling Gaza's population.
The film includes references to the Holocaust.
"I'm not saying it's the same. I don't think it is. I think what we should be doing is recognising similar patterns of dehumanisation," he explained.
Public opinion
"NAZA" was a late addition to the top competition this year in Venice, where organisers have selected several films about the Gaza conflict.
Last year, "The Voice of Hind Rajab", a docu-drama about the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza by Israeli forces, picked up second prize at the festival.
The films, as well as increasing condemnation of Israel's conduct in Gaza from top entertainment figures, are part of a broad shift in public opinion in Western countries against the war and Israeli policies.
US actress Susan Sarandon, one of the most persistent critics of the bombardment, claimed this week that the narrative around Gaza and the United States' financial and military support for Israel had "completely changed".
"There's a lot of things that people are aware of now," the "Thelma & Louise" star told a news conference.
Foreign journalists have been prevented from reporting from Gaza since the start of the conflict, other than under tightly controlled conditions with the Israeli military.
Some Israeli journalists have questioned the war "but it's very, very few, especially in the mainstream media", Szor told reporters.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says more than 200 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, constituting "the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented".
© 2026 AFP
