Lior Raz, lead actor and co-creator of Netflix's "Fauda" series, was in Romania when he received a call from his sister on October 7, 2023. She said she needed to be rescued while she was in a shelter at a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip. His sister managed to save herself.
Two days later, Raz and his writing partner Avi Issacharoff, both veterans of a military unit similar to the one portrayed in the series, became volunteers at a meeting point in southern Israel. There, they received names and phone numbers of people in border communities who needed to be evacuated.
While rockets were being fired from Gaza and attackers remained at large, with the Israeli government absent, the two ran in the dark extracting strangers in Raz's SUV. A woman they rescued looked at Raz and seemed to momentarily forget the chaos around her, as Issacharoff recalled.
The war in Gaza has now entered the "Fauda" series itself, which portrays Israeli undercover agents in counter-terrorism operations. For the screenwriters, addressing the conflict was something that "burned inside us," according to their statements.
