‘Fauda’ creator says new season may feature Israel's war on Gaza

Avi Issacharoff, co-creator of Israeli Netflix series Fauda, has confirmed that the show's upcoming fifth season may likely contain a plot related to the current war on Gaza. 

While Issacharoff did not specify what the new season would entail, he said that the fifth season initially was set to centre on a kidnapping plot that saw an Israeli taken hostage by Palestinian fighters and taken back to the Gaza Strip. 

However, following the October 7 attack on Israel, Issacharoff was adamant that material be "tossed out" to make way for rewrites that reflect real life events.  

"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," Issacharoff was quoted by the Jewish Chronicle as saying at an event in London last week.

Israel's war on Gaza has devastated the coastal enclave, killing at least 25,700 people — 70 percent of whom are women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry. 

Fauda, which means "chaos" in Arabic, has drawn controversy since it premiered in 2015. 

A video clip of Myriam Francois, a renowned British journalist and documentarian, criticising the “insane” premise of a question she was asked about the bombing of Houthis on Sky News has gone viral on social media 👇 pic.twitter.com/ZKE1hBEpL5

— The New Arab (@The_NewArab) January 24, 2024

The first prominent Israeli show to screen in both Hebrew and Arabic, it has attracted a mainstream following since it was picked up by Netflix in 2016.

The series was seen by some as displaying the brutality of the occupation while at the same offering intimate, human portrayals of Palestinian combatants. 

However, others see the show as being one-sided, depicting as Israeli agents as the dare-devil protagonists. 

The show was also described by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in a statement issued in March 2018 as "an anti-Arab, racist, Israeli propaganda tool that glorifies the Israeli military’s war crimes against the Palestinian people".  

BDS also condemned the Netflix series for helping to "sanitise" and "normalise" Israeli war crimes, adding that it is "directly complicit in promoting and justifying these grave human rights violations". 

Mouna Hawa, who starred in the first season of Fauda, was recently lambasted by entertainment industry peers for privately criticising Israel's brutal war on Gaza.

A series of private messages featuring Hawa were leaked to Israeli news sites, showing the actor denouncing the disproportionate killing of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. 

Hawa was later uninvited to the season premiere of Israeli series Manayek, as colleagues accused her of being a Hamas supporter.