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Israeli TV show Fauda returned to Netflix on Tuesday with its fifth season.
In its early seasons, the series sought to portray human stories on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The show’s newest iteration, created by Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz, takes place two years after the 7 October 2023 attacks by militant group Hamas on southern Israel.
It follows the story of Doron Kavillio, a commander of an undercover Israeli military unit hunting down a Hamas operative he thought he had killed.
Doron also heads to France’s Marseille after discovering that an old friend has gone rogue on an unsanctioned revenge mission.
Raz, who plays Doron, told Netflix’s official companion site Tudum that season 5 was “not about trying to show what happened.”
“It was about trying to tell a story, to see how we can implant our characters inside those situations and in that story that really happened,” Raz said.
“So for us, it was important to be very accurate to what happened in real life, but also to put our characters into this unpredictable situation”.
Raz added that he hoped viewers would understand “how peace is important, and how we need to think differently and how war is ruining the universe.”
“It’s ruining our region, it’s ruining our country, and their countries, for sure. We know that people see this show all over the world — in the Arab world, in Israel — [and they’ll see] that the price of the war is hard, and we need to have hope to solve this situation,” he said.
Hamas’ 7 October attacks on Israel killed around 1,200 people, while another 251 were taken hostage into the Gaza Strip.
In response, Israel began an air campaign against Gaza, while also launching a ground invasion of the territory.
Israel’s offensive has resulted in the deaths of more than 73,600 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. The United Nations considers the ministry’s figures reliable, and Israeli officials have since stated that the numbers are broadly accurate.