The Algorithm That Decided Who Lives and Dies in Gaza

When Screens Become Death Sentences

For so long, I wondered why I survived while family and friends were killed. Now I know the only difference between life and death may have been an AI algorithm.

Watching NAZA was like peering through a window — and seeing the machinery of killing in 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.

The Machine Behind the Massacre

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.

What surprised me in the film wasn't the massive scale of the killing, or even the coldness of it, but the proficiency of the soldiers who coolly described destroying people's lives as if they were discussing a routine errand. One described the work simply as a “mission”, while another compared it to a “video game”.

One soldier described knowing exactly what some of the people were doing in the moments before he killed them. He recalled hearing a man talking to his wife in bed. A baby crying. The sound of the TV. Despite taking all that humanity in, he quickly gave permission to drop the bomb.

The soldier explained how he would then go out with friends in the evening, and come back the next morning to do it all over again. For these Israeli soldiers, killing Palestinians was simply a task that could be paused and repeated.

From Numbers to Names

Throughout the screening, I could not stop myself from putting names back into the places where the film placed numbers. When one soldier described how Israeli forces massacred Palestinians at aid distribution sites, I thought of my cousin, 35-year-old Raed Majed Mushtaha, killed in the “Flour Massacre” in early 2024 as he searched for food for his family. I remembered my friend Youssef Maher Dawas, killed in the first week of the genocide, whose body was later found beneath rubble.

Other soldiers described how the army authorised the killing of 20 civilians in pursuit of a single junior target, and as many as 500 in pursuit of a senior target. These targets, however, had predominantly been “incriminated” by an AI system that, the soldiers admit, was known to err in about 15% of cases – yet they killed them anyway, along with their whole families.

I felt stuck on that. I thought about my uncle, Hisham Zafer Mushtaha, his wife, Hanan, their sons, Basel and Mohammed, and their four grandchildren, Raged, Hisham, Lana and Abdrahman, aged between three and 12 years old. I imagined them being killed because an AI algorithm assumed there might be a target there.

Survival by Chance

For the soldiers, these moments are merely part of a daily “mission”. But Raed, Youssef, Hisham, Hanan, Basel, Mohammed, Raged, Hisham, Lana and Abdrahman were people I knew and loved, whose calls I waited for, whose absence will for ever be felt.

For so long, I had asked how these people I knew were killed. Watching the film, my mind kept returning to the opposite question: how did I survive? I had spent so much of my life in Gaza thinking that, because I did not belong to any faction, I would be safe. I believed that if Israel was justifying its killings to the world by portraying those it killed as military targets, then I would make it out alive, because I was not one of them.

But the difference between me and the people I've lost may have been nothing more than what an AI algorithm flagged, and what someone decided, through a screen in Tel Aviv, would be an acceptable amount of NAZA. I realised, perhaps for the first time, that there was no precaution that I could have taken that would have guaranteed my survival. The fact that I did survive was completely random. And when I think about that, my heart sinks.

The Hidden Cost of Technology

What I want, watching this, is not catharsis. I have had enough of that. I want to attach names to the soldiers themselves – the ones who said it was “fun” to destroy Gaza, who viewed Palestinians in Gaza as mere data points. This is the only way that the “systematic” nature of Israel's killing machine stops functioning as a shield, one that allows those responsible to feel as if they were mere cogs.

But sitting there after the film, a new thought took over: what if the soldiers watching them know more about where my family are than I do? What if they can see what I cannot? My family might be sitting together, drinking tea, laughing at something one of my brothers said, while, somewhere far away, those same moments could already be data on a screen.

And as I spoke to them that night, for a moment I forgot everything I had seen in the film. I did not hear coordinates, or surveillance, or AI. I heard my family. A familiar voice. A breath. And I understood, in that moment, what these systems can never account for: that each person on the screen is an entire world unto themselves.

A Call for Accountability

After its screening at the Venice film festival, the film received a 25-minute standing ovation – an indictment, I couldn't help thinking, of a western media that spent three years treating Palestinian journalists as unreliable narrators of our own deaths. A room rose to its feet, but that has not stopped the machine: the bombing hasn't stopped, the machine on screen is still running even as the credits roll.

I'm glad the testimony exists; glad it's believed now. But belief this late, costing us this much, is not safety. My people do not feel safer because a film about their killers received applause in a theatre they will never sit in.

What We've Lost

The NAZA documentary is not just an exposé — it's a mirror held up to the brutal reality of how modern warfare is being conducted, using artificial intelligence as both weapon and justification. It reveals how algorithms can become instruments of genocide, turning human lives into numbers on a screen.

This is not a story about politics or ideology — it's a deeply personal one. It's about the families torn apart, the children who will never grow up, the dreams that were lost in an instant. This is the cost of technological warfare, where every kill is justified by data, and every life is reduced to a calculation.

The truth is we are all complicit if we let this continue without accountability. As journalists, we must demand answers. We must ensure that the systems that govern such decisions are transparent and humane — because in the end, every life matters more than any algorithm can decide.

• Every airstrike must be a human decision, not a digital one
• Every civilian death must be investigated, not just reported
• No algorithm should ever determine who lives or dies