‘Fauda’ star: After Oct. 7, script revised to be ‘tougher,’ more ‘militaristic’

“Fauda” co-creator and star Lior Raz said Tuesday that the new season of the show had to be completely revamped following Hamas’s October 7 massacre, and that new episodes of the espionage thriller will have an even darker tone than past seasons.

“We changed the outline of the season because of October 7, because it’s impossible to tell the story like we thought we could,” he told Channel 12 news, adding that it was a lot harder to show the personal lives of those on “the other side” as they usually try to do.

“It no longer interests us. The series we are going to air will be a lot tougher, and perhaps more militaristic than the other seasons,” he said.

Raz and co-creator Avi Issacharoff traveled to Sderot on October 9 with the Brothers in Arms organization of reservist soldiers and, under rocket fire, evacuated two families from the town, which had been hit hard by Hamas terrorists during the massacre two days earlier.

“It was nothing compared to the other heroes in our country,” he told Channel 12 of his experience there.

On October 7, Hamas-led gunmen slaughtered 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 253 people to Gaza while committing brutal atrocities in southern communities.

Accompanied by Yohanan Plesner @yplesner and Avi @issacharoff , I headed down south to join hundreds of brave "brothers in arms" volunteers who worked tirelessly to assist the population in the south of Israel. We were sent to the bombarded town of Sderot to extract 2 families pic.twitter.com/WpM9JLeOZM

— Lior Raz (@lioraz) October 9, 2023

Issacharoff told The Times of London in October that he had scoffed at his scriptwriting team’s storyline proposal for the show’s fifth season about dozens of Hamas terrorists storming the border and taking a kibbutz by surprise and controlling it.

“I was like, ‘Guys, come on, what is this? Without anyone knowing? With no intelligence indication?’” said Issacharoff, a longtime Middle East analyst and creator of the award-winning Netflix show with Raz. “They’ll come to the border and a few planes or choppers will kill them. It’s too stupid.”

The show, based on Issacharoff’s military service in the undercover Duvdevan unit, aired its fourth season in 2022 and was renewed for a fifth season in September.

Its third season, which aired in 2019-2020, was set in Gaza, with the show’s lead character Doron Kabilio, played by Raz, posing as a Palestinian boxing instructor to infiltrate the senior ranks of Hamas.

Actor Idam Amedi, who played in Fauda’s seasons 2-4, was seriously injured as a reservist fighting in Gaza.