‘Fauda’ star Lior Raz describes real-life role after sister called from shelter on Oct. 7

“Fauda” co-creator and star Lior Raz has described his personal experiences during the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, including how his sister begged him for help as terrorists prowled outside, and his own actions, gun in hand, as he later helped secure the south of the country.

Raz told the UK’s Mail on Sunday that he was in Romania when the attack started and only learned what was going on when his sister called him from the bomb shelter of a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip as Hamas led thousands of terrorists to invade the country.

On that day, Hamas-led gunmen slaughtered 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages while committing brutal atrocities in southern communities.

“Lior, you need to save me because I’m with my kids at the shelter,” he recalled her saying in the interview, which was published online Saturday. “There are terrorists around us.”

At first, Raz said, he didn’t know what she was talking about, but when he checked his phone and television, “I saw all those horrible videos that we have all seen.”

Raz, who plays undercover unit commander Doron Kavillio in the hit show, rushed back to Israel, arriving the next day, by which time his sister, who was not named in the interview, was already safe.

Together with co-creator Avi Issacharoff, both of whom served in the IDF’s elite undercover Duvdevan unit and based “Fauda” on their experiences, he 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.

“I took my Jeep and my gun, and I went down to the south because there were still terrorists,” he said. “There were missiles. Families were stuck in their houses. They needed to be rescued.”

“It was the hardest day ever. There has not been one day since – not one day – I haven’t thought about it,” he said.

But Raz recalled that his TV fame also led to amusing situations.

In one incident, he knocked on the door of a home to check on the family inside.

“They see me, and they get confused, and, you know, ‘Doron, what are you doing here?’ They thought that they were in a scene from Fauda.”

The experiences shared by Raz and Issacharoff shaped the brutal narrative of Fauda’s fifth season, which included two episodes about October 7.

“For me, as an actor, to be there again, to play and to act in the same situation that really happened in real life was very hard,” Raz said. “We felt that we’re doing something much more important than shooting a show.”

In September, Raz and Issacharoff both spoke to the New York Times about the challenges the production team faced in writing the new season as they sought to portray the harsh reality of October 7 without depicting too much carnage in a show that was still supposed to be entertainment.

Raz said it was was “maybe the most important thing that we ever wrote.”

“You try to be as close to reality as possible. On the other hand, you cannot show everything, because it’s too terrible,” Issacharoff said at the time.

The fifth season of “Fauda” premiered in May this year.