The Guardian ·
Watching NAZA was like peering through a window – and seeing the machinery of killing in Gaza
I now know that the only difference between life and death may have been an AI algorithm, says Mahmoud Mushtaha, a Palestinian journalist from Gaza
The lights go down, and for a moment I forget I’m watching a screen. It fills with a rooftop in Tel Aviv at night, black and grey. The camera pans down. Through windows, we see people watching screens of their own – couples holding each other close, following the news, eating food. They appear absorbed in their own worlds, and why wouldn’t they be?
That’s the thing I can’t get past as a Palestinian journalist from Gaza, watching this apparent tranquillity: this must be it – this must be what safety actually looks like. Just an evening uninterrupted, with no military aircraft flying overhead or drones buzzing incessantly. Meanwhile, men and women on the rooftop above them calmly talk about how they decided how many Palestinian civilians would die on any given night.
These are the soldiers, mostly intelligence officers, who helped Israel carry out its destruction of Gaza. Their testimonies form the basis of NAZA, a documentary whose title comes from an Israeli military acronym used to indicate how many civilians are likely to die in an airstrike on the territory.
