The co-creator of Israeli hit series has told the JC that it would be “impossible” not to mention the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in the next series of the Netflix TV show.
Speaking at an event at St Johns Wood Synagogue with Sunday Times journalist Josh Glancy, Avi Issacharoff told the audience that all the work the cast and crew had done on Fauda season five had to be “tossed out” and rewritten in the wake of the chaos in Israel since October 7.
Avi Issacharoff, co-creator of the Israeli TV drama 'Fauda' (Photo: Getty)
He told the JC: “I don't think that a single man or woman in Israel weren’t shocked.” Speaking about what the war means for Israeli TV, he said: “Some people will be able to ignore it [the war] but we can’t, we will have to write the war in, in some way.”
Season three of Fauda featured Gaza terrorists infiltrating Israel to take a hostage back into the Strip. Issacharoff said that when writing those episodes, the writers proposed to make the storyline bigger, to include more terrorists, similar to the real life events that would happen years later on October 7.
They did not end up including this in the show, as it was deemed to be too unrealistic. He told the Forward: “Fauda tries to be authentic and realistic. If you come up with something like that, it sounds crazy. So we gave it up. And then, Saturday morning, we saw something way, way, way worse than what we tried to imagine.”
The event, hosted by the Tel Aviv University Trust featured Issacharoff telling stories about his time in Gaza embedded with Fatah preventative security officers, as well as seeing the Gaza tunnels firsthand. Issacharoff said that he’d seen Hamas’s “empires of tunnels” beneath the Strip.
When asked about the future for the current Israeli government after the war, Issacharoff told the JC: “Part of the problem is the Israeli government, the prime minister is not willing to discuss the day after. So we don't really know what's going on. They after they look like. But we still have some time for the day after.”
He added: “Netanyahu knows that he will go to an election and he will lose, so he’s doing everything he can to avoid that.”
Issacharoff, a TV producer/journalist who spent decades covering Gaza for a variety of Israeli publications and served in the elite duvdevan combat unit, wrote Fauna together with actor and star Lior Raz. After its debut in 2016, the show went on to become one of Israel’s most successful cultural exports of recent years - even placing highly in Netflix’s top 10 shows in Arab countries as well as Israel.
