CrossBinge
Fauda (2015)

Fauda (2015)

Fauda (2015)

Original title: פאודה

Fauda is a 2015 Hebrew-language drama series created by Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz. It stars Lior Raz, Netta Garti and Doron Ben-David.

Close-quarters work, small teams, and a target who was supposed to be finished. Fauda follows Doron, a commander in an Israeli Mista'arvim unit, and the operators he leads back into the field for one more pursuit. Wikipedia's summary of the first season describes their quarry as a Hamas figure known as The Panther.

Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff developed the series out of their own service in the Israel Defense Forces, and Raz plays Doron himself. The result sits between political thriller and action drama, built around a unit that works undercover rather than in uniform. Netta Garti, Tsahi Halevi, Tomer Capone, Hisham Suliman and Shadi Mar'i fill out the ensemble.

Israeli television carried the first season in 2015. Netflix later picked the show up for the rest of the world, which is how most viewers outside Israel found it.

The subject is live and contested, and this page takes no position on it. Every characterisation above, including the description of the season-one target, comes from the series' own premise and from Wikipedia's account of it. Read it as description, not endorsement. Come for the politics and you will find a thriller made by two former soldiers about the work they knew; come for the craft and you get a procedural about surveillance, cover identities and small units under pressure.

Where to watch Fauda

Stream: Netflix

Official site

https://www.yesstudios.tv/fauda

Cast

Similar series

Explore Fauda guides

Fauda in our writing

A few thoughts on Fauda

Two comics sit closest to this one. The Attack [a Graphic Novel] adapts Yasmina Khadra's novel about a surgeon in Israel whose settled life comes apart after a bombing, and it stays with the civilian ground that Doron's team crosses at speed. Footnotes in Gaza is Joe Sacco's reported comics journalism, built from interviews and archive work, slowing the same history to a pace no thriller allows.

For tradecraft as nonfiction, Mossad runs through Israeli intelligence operations in plain reporting. On film, The Operative follows a handler and the agent he runs through a long deployment, closer to Fauda's waiting than its raids, and Walk on Water sends an Israeli intelligence officer undercover on an assignment where the cover story takes over.

Undercover units that live inside their cover

Doron's team in Fauda works in plain clothes, speaking the language of the place they operate in, close enough that a neighbour offers them coffee. These series build the same way, on officers who hold a cover identity for months and on the small domestic details that keep it standing. Most of the tension arrives in conversation.

Thrillers shot in the language of the place they're set

Fauda runs in Hebrew and Arabic, and a character switching between them carries plot weight. These thrillers make the same choice, shooting in Tehran, Tel Aviv, Madrid or Delhi in the languages spoken there, so an accent or a misplaced word turns into a problem someone has to solve in the moment. Read the subtitles and you get the whole scene.

Books and graphic novels from the same corner of the map

Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff drew Fauda from their own service, one vantage point on the ground the series covers. These books and comics offer others: Joe Sacco's reporting from Gaza, Guy Delisle's year of drawing Jerusalem, histories of the intelligence service, and crime novels working the same streets. Pick whichever form you read fastest.

Spy series where one operation runs all season

Fauda keeps its camera on one small team and lets a single pursuit stretch across a season, with the desk officers and the family at home in frame. These series work at that scale too, following a handler, a station, or a unit through an operation that outlasts any one episode. Expect long plots and people who cannot go home at the end of a shift.