The soldiers did not mark no-go zones they created in Gaza. They waited for civilians to unknowingly step into them and promptly shot them dead. Then they watched on their surveillance screens as roaming dogs ate the corpses.

NAZA, the documentary film that won five awards at the Venice Film Festival, takes its name from Israel Defense Forces (IDF) jargon for human collateral damage. Specifically, it refers to the number of people soldiers are permitted to kill in an attack on a single Hamas target. In an exercise to assassinate one suspect, for instance, they had the go-ahead to kill 500 people.

“It was like a video game,” says one of the 24 soldiers and military intelligence operatives interviewed anonymously under the cloak of Tel Aviv’s night-time rooftops.

Another says he was involved in killing “several thousand” people and acknowledges he participated in “genocide”, but, when asked why he went along with it, his answer is more chilling than even the image of the scavenging dogs. “You’re having fun,” he says. “It’s so insanely fun.”

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The technology of modern warfare is pushing man’s inhumanity to man to terrifying new frontiers of cold-blooded detachment. Massacring innocents has become as impersonal as picking off animation figures in Grand Theft Auto. Phones, drones, computer-guided missiles and artificial intelligence (AI) have facilitated the slaughter of more than 74,000 men, women........

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