Israel-Hamas war surpasses darkest Netflix’s Fauda plot, says co-creator

The October 7 attack by Hamas and the Gaza war have surpassed the darkest plots its writers could have imagined, said co-creator Avi Issacharoff. In recent days, the production team learnt that one of their own, Matan Meir, 38, was killed last Friday during combat as an army reservist inside the besieged coastal territory ruled by Hamas. Meir, a producer, was one of five soldiers killed in the northern Gaza Strip, the army said. He was buried on Monday. Fauda, which means “chaos” in Arabic, was co-created by journalist Issacharoff and lead actor Lior Raz, based on their experiences in the Mista’arvim counterterrorism unit. “With all the respect due to our TV show, we’re not even close to reality because reality is way more complicated than everything we have written,” Issacharoff told AFP. He recalled the morning when Hamas militants, under cover of a rocket barrage, broke through the militarised Gaza border and launched their attack on southern Israel that officials say claimed around 1,200 lives and saw 240 hostages taken back into Gaza. The surprise onslaught sparked an intense retaliatory campaign of air strikes and a ground invasion that have claimed more than 11,240 lives, according to Hamas authorities. Global concern has flared over the high death toll among Palestinian civilians, many of them children, as fierce combat rages around embattled Gaza City hospitals, and regional tensions boil. Issacharoff remembered the day it all started and missile alarm sirens blared: “I didn’t behave like the creator of the show, or a journalist – at that time I am just a human being.” “When you see the (news of) atrocities coming from the south, first dozens of people killed, then it’s hundreds, you realise it’s the biggest number of Jews killed in one day since the Holocaust.”