A Palestinian journalist writing about the film NAZA says a sequence of images felt like looking through a window into the machinery that had governed life and death in Gaza. In his account, lights dim, a camera lingers on a rooftop in Tel Aviv and then pans down to people inside apartments—couples watching television, eating, absorbed in ordinary evening routines.
For the writer, that ordinary scene was unsettling because it was accompanied by footage of people above those apartments calmly discussing how many Palestinian civilians would die on a given night. The juxtaposition of domestic calm and detached operational planning struck him as a clear depiction of how violence and civilian life can exist side by side.
The journalist said that for years he had wondered why he survived while family and friends were killed. After watching the material he concluded that the distinction between who lived and who died may not have been chance or fate but the output of an algorithm. The piece frames that realisation as profoundly disorienting: survival, he writes, felt as if it might have been decided by a technical system rather than by human choices alone.
His reflection raises wider questions about the increasing use of artificial intelligence and automated systems in conflict settings. The account does not specify technical details or name the organisations involved in the footage, but it highlights concerns about accountability, transparency and the ethical implications of delegating life-or-death decisions to opaque processes.
Observers and human rights advocates have in recent years warned about the risks of algorithmic decision-making in warfare, including potential biases, errors and a lack of meaningful oversight. The journalist’s experience, as described in his column, adds a personal perspective to those debates by connecting the abstract idea of algorithmic targeting to the lived realities of people in Gaza who lost relatives and still grapple with why they survived.
Whatever the precise technical arrangements shown in NAZA, the piece underscores a wider unease: the normalization of distant, clinical decision-making about civilian lives, and the urgent need for public scrutiny of how emerging technologies are used in conflict.