While one of the producers of the Israeli program has just died in Gaza, the co-creator of this hit series is alarmed to see reality surpassing his fiction.
International success, the Israeli series Fauda had played its third season in Gaza with a kidnapping scenario that far exceeded the scale of reality today, notes series creator Avi Issacharoff.
Aired in recent years on Netflix, Fauda (“chaos” in Arabic) captured audiences far beyond Israel by delving into the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the battle between a unit of undercover Israeli agents and a fugitive Hamas military leader.
The grief team
On Saturday, the show’s team shared a reality that goes beyond any scenario: “We are completely devastated to announce that one of FaudaMatan Meir was killed during an operation in Gaza,” they wrote on the series’ Instagram account.
“Matan had participated in the second and third seasons” of Faudarecalls Avi Issacharoff in an interview with AFP, referring to someone “very positive”, “always ready to help”, who was responsible for organizing film shoots.
Matan Meir, a 38-year-old producer and reservist soldier, was killed Friday evening along with four other soldiers during a military operation in the northern Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces are fighting the movement, the army said.
“I feel devastated, we don’t see the end, we are living in the worst times in the history of this country,” said one of the directors, Rotem Shamir, at his funeral, where his coffin was carried by six comrades from his country. unit.
“The reality is much more complicated than what we have written”
He is not the only one in the team caught up in the war: one of the actors in the series, Idan Amedi (Sagui), posted a video on Twitter on October 12 showing him in military uniform, called up by a reservist to to fight. unity, adding: “This is not a scene of Faudait is real life.”
Its raw depiction of the daily lives of Israelis and Palestinians has largely contributed to its popularity Fauda: ubiquitous security restrictions, attacks, night operations of the army in Palestinian territories.
Despite the apparent parallels between the fiction and Israel’s war against Hamas, “we are far from reality, because reality is much more complicated than anything we have written,” Israeli journalist told AFP Avi Issacharoff, co-author of the series.
“I’m pessimistic”
The third season of Fauda is set in the Gaza Strip and tells of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces, who came to free two civilian hostages, a scenario that was already perceived as being pushed at the time of the season’s release.
According to the Israeli military, about 240 people were taken hostage in the Gaza Strip during the October 7 Hamas attack, an unprecedented event since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
“Unfortunately, I cannot imagine a rescue operation like the one we see in our fiction to bring back all the hostages alive. I am pessimistic,” said this longtime critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies.
disastrous fight
Avi Issacharoff says he experienced the October 7 attacks “just as a human being,” without thinking about the storylines he had been creating for years about the Israeli-Palestinian chaos.
“We ran into our anti-missile room … and that’s when we found out it wasn’t just some missiles, it was a terrorist infiltration,” he said.
With Lior Raz (Doron), co-author and one of the protagonists of Fauda, ”on the second day we went to Sderot to get the city’s inhabitants out of the fire zone,” he says, after which the two friends served both in special units, some of which operated undercover and were inspired Fauda.
“The most extreme disaster you can imagine”
At least 11,180 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Israeli bombardments in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war, according to the Hamas Health Ministry. The Palestinian Islamic movement’s bloody attack on Israel left approximately 1,200 dead, the majority of them civilians.
Avi Issacharoff is watching with concern the advance of the Israeli army now fighting in the heart of Gaza City.
“If you’re fighting in an open urban area, the threat can come from a window, a door, a tunnel, anywhere,” he says. “Fighting in an urban area is a disaster, the most extreme thing you can imagine.”