Lior Raz says Fauda season five carries the weight of the Oct. 7 attacks straight into the story, with two episodes set on Oct. 7, 2023 and the rest jumping two years later. The Netflix series is moving from aftermath to action, and the creators are asking viewers to sit with both at once.
Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff
Raz, who stars in Fauda as Doron, told that the Oct. 7 material is “maybe the most important thing that they ever wrote.” He also said, “I want them to look in my character’s eyes, and to see what we felt on those days,” a line that frames the season less like a detour than a direct response to the attacks.
Avi Issacharoff, Raz’s writing partner on Fauda, said the process was raw from the start. “This was something that burned inside us, that we felt we had to spill it out,” he said, adding the pain, sadness, catastrophe, loss of people, loss of close people, confusion, and impotence that fed the scripts.
Netflix Tuesday
Netflix says season five has 11 episodes, with two episodes taking place on Oct. 7, 2023 and the rest set two years later. A Netflix synopsis says Fauda’s fighters embark on a deadly race to stop a catastrophic attack on Israel two years after October 7th, which gives the season a split structure: one stretch rooted in the day itself, another in the consequences that follow.
reported that the writers steered clear of Gaza almost entirely, moving the story instead from Europe to Israel with stops elsewhere in the Middle East. That choice keeps the season focused on the ripples of the Oct. 7 attacks rather than turning it into a wider war chronicle, and it puts the show in the middle of the same backlash and boycott pressure surrounding the conflict.
Tudum interview
Issacharoff said in a separate interview with Tudum, “We were shaking.” He said the writers kept asking, “Am I going to do something that will make people suffer more? [Make people] more sad? Hurt people that lost their closest [loved ones]? Hurt people on the other side?”
He added, “I think that we went with our truth — with our belief — that this is the right story to tell, and this is the right way to tell the story.” He also said, “It’s not reality. But still, we thought that there was a story here to be told. We wanted to ask very tough questions to people all over the world, not only in Israel.”
That is the season’s sharpest business and creative bet: an 11-episode Netflix run built around two Oct. 7 episodes, then released into a conversation that will not be limited to the series itself. Issacharoff said writing the new season “allowed me to take all the pain, and even anger, and put it in a document, to put it in a script,” and that is exactly how Fauda is approaching season five — as a drama that chooses the hard subject first and leaves the audience to deal with the fallout on Netflix Tuesday.
