Filmmakers Say AI Tracked Targets Home in Gaza and Civilian Deaths Became Routine

The filmmakers behind the documentary Nasra argue that the killing of civilians in Gaza did not happen mainly by mistake. They say it happened by system.

Filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Shorr say they based the film on interviews with more than 100 Israeli soldiers and officers, with 24 appearing on camera, to describe AI based systems used to find targets and to estimate how many civilians would die with them.

First, they say, AI systems helped choose who counted as a Hamas target. Abraham said, "The Israeli military relied on these AI-based systems knowing that they had an error rate," in what he describes as a statistical approach.

Then came a system the filmmakers call Where is Daddy. Shorr says it alerts intelligence officers when a target enters his home, by surveilling family members, sometimes including children's phones.

Abraham said that after October 7th, these systems "turned into a mechanism that normalized and allowed for the killing of civilians instead of minimizing it."

Shorr says many of the officers and soldiers described in the film came from the elite part of Israeli society, sometimes considered themselves left wing, and many were born in or lived in Tel Aviv. She adds that the main military headquarters is in central Tel Aviv, and that some of the airstrike operations were run from there.

Before a bomb falls, the filmmakers say, another calculation estimates the cost. The army calls civilian deaths NASa, meaning collateral damage. One soldier says in the film, "We never say in the army a strike is going to kill fifteen children. We say fifteen NASa." Abraham says there was "a widespread authorization to bomb up to twenty civilians," twenty NASa, for "these low-ranking targets, some of them marked with AI," and hundreds when the target was more senior. He says "it's an algorithm that calculates how many people are going to be bombed in each house."