What the Score Cannot See
NAZA · Part One

Andrew Buck — human author, account and editorial direction
Quill — writing and copyedit
Cap’n — research and editorial integration
Published October 26, 2026

Autumn asked me to go see a film with her. I didn’t know what it was about. I went because I have been trying to listen to her, spend time with her, take her seriously, and see the human being she is, was, and wants to become. She’s having a hard time becoming that person. I’m just trying to love her, because I do.

The film was NAZA.

When we left the theater, the city we walked into was different from the city we had walked in from. Birmingham felt like Tel Aviv. It looked like Tel Aviv. Gaza was much farther away.

That distance is part of what I saw. The film is built mostly from interviews. The people speaking are concealed on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv. According to the filmmakers, there were 24 Israeli military interviewees, most of them intelligence officers. They worked inside Israeli surveillance and airstrike systems. The interviewees included men and women. Most belonged to Israel’s socioeconomic elite and served in prestigious intelligence units. NAZA is a Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage: the civilians whom officers were prepared to kill while trying to kill someone they believed was connected to Hamas or another armed group. The people in the film describe how those numbers were discussed and approved. They describe the system from inside it. The filmmakers on NAZA. The interviewees.

Call them Israel’s best and brightest. The up-and-comers. Forty under forty. Give the units status and a path to a good future, and more talented young people will want the same chair.

That prestige is part of the weapon. The system needs someone willing to sit at a screen and approve how many members of a family can die. It promises a whole life on the winning side of the screen: money, attention, admiration, someone wanting you, people knowing your name. It tells you this work can make you important. On the other side, a family loses every future it was trying to have.

Some of them talked about the work like a game. One described it as fun. One said, “It’s like a video game.” The person on the screen became remote. The work became something a person could play.

Another soldier describes people approaching a food-distribution centre. “They looked like a swarm of ants running towards the food.” He was describing hungry human beings. The Arts Desk’s account of the film.

Israeli officers hacked family phones, listened to calls, and read messages saying a parent had returned home. Where’s Daddy? used that information to locate a target at home. Officers approved attacks knowing the target’s family was inside the house. ABC Arts on NAZA.

Israeli intelligence officers sat at screens knowing families and children were inside the homes they selected. They reviewed the target, approved how many civilian deaths they would allow, and authorized the attack. Then an airstrike hit the home. People died.

Behind the screen are people digging through concrete and steel, looking for their families and calling their names. I thought about the footage we watched after September 11. People searching rubble for human beings. We knew what that meant when it happened to us. We knew the rubble held lives. We knew each missing person had a name, a family, a place at a table, a bed they had slept in, and people waiting to hear that they were alive.

People can design a system to turn those same human facts into numbers.

Imagine the scoreboard:

HAMAS: 1
NAZA: 500
Click to fire.

Reporting based on six unnamed Israeli intelligence sources says Lavender, an artificial intelligence system, ranked people by suspected affiliation with the armed wings of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad using information drawn from mass surveillance. The Gospel marked buildings. Where’s Daddy? tracked when a person returned home. Other software estimated how many civilians might be inside a household. Human officers selected thresholds, decided how many civilian deaths they would permit, and authorized strikes. The software did not reach into the world by itself. People designed the pipeline. People accepted its errors. People chose how much review was enough. People chose what the scores allowed them to do. Yuval Abraham on Lavender.

The sources described phones that could be shared or reassigned, loose connections treated as signals, and short reviews before a person was approved as a target. A score can look exact while the life underneath it is messy. A phone changes hands. A family shares a device. A person knows somebody. An algorithm finds a pattern. Then a human being decides the pattern is enough.

Imagine the other controls:

Get Help
Fix Error
Ask for Clarification
AI-powered Double Check
Mark Not Hamas
Human Override

Call a Therapist
Call My Parents
Quit
Leave
Live a Different Life

The Israeli military says NAZA gives a distorted picture. It says its tools assist analysts, humans approve targets and strikes, and decisions follow international law. It denies that a number in a system automatically authorizes civilian deaths. The Israeli military’s response.

On October 26, 2026, we requested the military’s targeting records, approval records and civilian-harm assessments. We asked for records showing what officers checked, which targets they rejected and when they stopped an attack. We will give the military an opportunity to comment on this reporting and include any substantive response.

A human rubber stamp is still a rubber stamp. One intelligence source told +972 that he spent about twenty seconds checking for a male voice at his review stage. A separate civilian-harm check estimated how many other people might be killed or injured and what the strike might destroy. Officers had to decide whether to approve an attack with that expected harm.

According to +972’s sources, early in the war officers were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians while targeting some junior suspected fighters. The military disputes that account. That is what we need the records to help establish: what was estimated, what was authorized and what happened to the people inside. The Lavender investigation.

In June 2024, the UN Human Rights Office examined six Israeli strikes and found indications that the military may have systematically violated the rules of distinction, proportionality and precautions in attack. Those rules require distinguishing civilians and civilian objects from military targets, avoiding excessive civilian harm and taking feasible precautions. We have not established whether Lavender was used in those six strikes. The UN assessment gives us serious grounds to challenge the military’s blanket assurance that its targeting follows the law. The UN assessment.

The film’s evidence is a separate body of reporting. In an October 17 statement, the Guardian said the filmmakers’ verification included leaked classified documents, checks of specific strikes and corroboration from confidential sources. We have asked the Guardian for publicly releasable or redacted supporting records, including any evidence connecting Lavender to those six attacks. Readers should be able to see what can be checked and where the evidence remains protected. The Guardian on the film’s verification.

End of Part One.

Come back for Part Two on Monday, November 2.

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