A few days after the horrifying October 7 terrorist assaults in Israel, throughout which Hamas militants killed some 1,300 folks and took scores of hostages again to Gaza, I used to be scrolling by my Instagram feed and seen two males in southern Israel taking cowl from rockets. As a result of one in every of them was actor Lior Raz, I believed for half a second that I used to be taking a look at a scene from Fauda — the four-season Netflix drama about an Israeli counterterrorism unit, a sequence full of intense motion that’s additionally garnered vital popularity of its nuanced dealing with of the battle between Israelis and Palestinians.
However no, this wasn’t Fauda’s Doron Kavillio within the discipline on one other fictional mission. Raz, the actor who performs Doron, is a former IDF soldier who drew upon his army expertise to co-create the present, and this footage was of Raz hugging a wall in actual life as a barrage of rockets fired from Gaza lit up the sky. Collectively along with his Fauda co-creator Avi Issacharoff, together with Israel Democracy Institute president Yohanan Plesner, he’d got down to try to assist extract two unidentified households.
“Headed down south,” Raz wrote in an Instagram put up, “to affix a whole bunch of courageous ‘brothers in arms’ volunteers who labored tirelessly to help the inhabitants within the south of Israel. We had been despatched to the bombarded city of Sderot to extract two households. No concern!”
Raz is however one of many many Israelis who’ve rejoined the Israeli Protection Forces in response to the assaults, a re-enlistment that underscores each the existential nature of the menace going through the nation — and the diploma to which everyone seems to be impacted by it.
Idan Amedi, one other Fauda actor who performs Sagi within the present, posted a video to X (previously Twitter) on Oct. 12 explaining that he’d been referred to as as much as serve with the IDF reserves in response to the assaults. “As you may see,” Amedi explains within the video, holding an extended gun whereas wearing his IDF uniform, “I’m in barely completely different apparel right now. This isn’t a scene from Fauda. That is actual life.”
Along with its stars who’ve returned to battle with the IDF, a minimum of one behind-the-scenes member of the Fauda crew has additionally been killed because the Hamas atrocities started. Throughout a Bloomberg occasion final week, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos himself confirmed that Hamas fighters killed Fauda sound editor Lior Waitzman. In keeping with Sarandos’ public remarks, “On Saturday morning, he went out biking, stopped, and texted his spouse that there’s been a taking pictures and that was the final she heard from him. As a result of he was a sufferer of that terrorist assault.”
