Some phone calls stay with you forever. For Lior Raz, one arrived in the early hours of October 7, 2023.
The Israeli actor, one of his country’s most recognisable stars and the co-creator of Netflix’s hit espionage series Fauda, was in a hotel room in Romania when his sister called. She was hiding with her children inside a kibbutz shelter near the Gaza border as rockets fell around them.
More than 1,000 miles from the unfolding disaster, and unaware of the full scale of Hamas’s deadly assault until that moment, Raz struggled to process what he was hearing.
‘My sister said, “Lior, you have to save me. I’m with my kids in the shelter. There are terrorists around us,”‘ Raz, 54, tells The Mail on Sunday in an exclusive interview.
‘I didn’t understand what she meant. She told me, “Look at your camera. Look at your phone. Look at your TV.” Then I saw the terrible videos that everyone has seen.’
Fans around the world know Raz as Doron Kavillio, the central figure in Fauda‘s high-stakes political thriller. Doron is an elite Israeli undercover commando, driven to pursue enemy operatives even when the mission threatens his family and personal life.
Since its debut in 2015, the series has become an international phenomenon, powered by sudden twists, violence, betrayal and nerve-shredding undercover operations.
Lior Raz, star of Fauda and one of Israel’s best-known actors, has described the devastating phone call from his sister on October 7
Lior Raz and Lucy Ayoub appear in Netflix’s global espionage hit Fauda
Yet on the day Hamas-led attackers crossed into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, the violence Raz had spent years depicting on screen became part of his own reality.
Footage of civilians being seized, including Nova music festival survivor Noa Argamani, conveyed the chaos almost as it happened.
Raz’s response was shaped by his own military background. Before becoming an actor, he served as a covert operative with Israel’s counterterrorism unit Duvdevan. His first instinct was to get home and do whatever he could to protect his sister and her family.
Although his sister had been brought to safety by the time he returned to Israel the next day, Raz says he felt ‘like a lion in a cage’, desperate to help. He travelled south and joined the volunteer groups Brothers and Sisters In Arms, assisting with the evacuation of families trapped in their homes.
‘I took my Jeep and my gun and drove south because terrorists were still there,’ he says. ‘There were missiles, and families were trapped inside their houses. They needed to be rescued.’
‘You don’t stop to think about whether you might die. You simply feel there are things you have to do.’ It sounds like a line Doron himself might deliver.
Raz’s fame as Doron also produced an unsettlingly surreal moment during the rescue effort.
‘I was knocking on someone’s door with my gun while missiles were falling,’ he recalls.
Raz plays Doron Kavillio, the elite undercover operative at the centre of the explosive political thriller
Images of Israelis being taken hostage, including Noa Argamani from the Nova music festival, emerged as the assault unfolded
‘They opened the door, saw me and became confused. They said, “Doron, what are you doing here?” They thought they had somehow walked into a scene from Fauda.’
But the experience has remained with him. ‘It was the hardest day of my life. Since then, there hasn’t been a single day—not one—when I haven’t thought about it.’ Those memories later shaped the fifth season of Fauda, which contains some of the most emotionally powerful episodes the series has produced for Netflix.
Raz, who writes the drama alongside Avi Issacharoff, made the painful decision to explore October 7 in two special episodes.
The production carried a heavy emotional burden. Members of the cast and crew had lost friends or relatives, or knew people who had been injured. Matan Meir, a member of the production team, was killed in November 2023 while serving as an Israel Defence Forces reservist in Gaza. Actor Idan Amedi survived his own IDF deployment, though an explosion in January 2024 left him with burns and shrapnel injuries to his eye sockets, jaw and neck.
Israeli soldiers heading into Gaza also passed the set while filming was under way.
‘As an actor, returning to that situation and performing something that had genuinely happened was extremely difficult,’ Raz says. ‘We felt we were making something far more significant than an ordinary television show.’
Some sequences were particularly painful to film.
In one scene, Doron cannot account for eight hours of October 7 and seeks help from a therapist. The storyline was inspired by a real survivor known to the writers who experienced a similar memory loss.
Raz was more than 1,000 miles away when the attacks began and learned of the massacre only after receiving the desperate call from his sister
The Fauda cast faced a profound emotional strain during production, with many knowing people who had been killed or wounded in the attack
‘I fell apart. I cried a great deal,’ Raz tells the MoS. ‘I had to leave. It was an incredibly difficult scene.’
Even after watching the finished episodes, Raz—who has four children and is married to Israeli actress Meital Berdah—finds it difficult to distinguish performance from personal memory. ‘I don’t see myself acting. I see myself inside the situation. There is no acting in it.’
Another disturbing sequence recreates the fate of young Israelis who hid inside a rubbish container while fleeing Hamas attackers.
The group believed they had found a place of safety, but the attackers located them and opened fire, leaving the victims trapped among the bodies inside.
In the series, Doron climbs into the container and discovers what happened.
‘The container story is based on something that really happened,’ Raz says. ‘Being there and filming it was one of the hardest things I have ever done.’
Raz and Issacharoff chose not to depict every detail of the October 7 atrocities, concerned that an overly graphic recreation could inflict further pain on Israeli audiences.
When the episodes were broadcast, viewers were warned that the material could be distressing and were given the option of skipping them.
The fifth season of Fauda avoided depicting the full horror of October 7 in graphic detail, partly to protect traumatised Israeli viewers
Hamas fighters pictured on a glider during the October 7 attacks
That restraint produced an unexpected backlash. Some viewers, many of them Arab, accused the show of softening or understating the history.
‘We wanted to handle it sensitively,’ Raz says. ‘We didn’t want to make a snuff film. It had to be thoughtful and watchable.’ That approach has not diminished the show’s global reach: Fauda has ranked among Netflix’s ten most-watched series in more than 40 countries.
Remarkably, Raz nearly missed out on the role he had created for himself.
When he and Issacharoff first presented the series to Israeli broadcaster Yes, TV, executives wanted an established star to lead it. Raz therefore agreed to audition.
With two actors left in the running, the director reportedly asked the casting team a straightforward question.
‘They are both excellent actors, but who would you follow into war? Who would you walk behind?’
The decision was unanimous. ‘Everyone in the room voted for me,’ Raz says. ‘So I got the part.’
His military experience likely helped. The dangers faced by Doron were familiar to Raz from his time in Duvdevan, whose operatives sometimes disguised themselves as Palestinian civilians while pursuing wanted terrorists. After leaving the unit, he also worked for a period as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodyguard.
The Daily Mail’s Natalie Lisbona with Lior Raz
Fauda draws significantly on Raz’s experiences in covert operations, although he remains careful about revealing the missions behind its storylines. ‘I have a responsibility to protect the unit,’ he says. ‘What I can say is that it is one of the finest and most extraordinary special-forces units in the world.’
A different personal tragedy informed one of the most heartbreaking stories in the first season of Fauda—a subject Raz rarely discusses.
At 16, he fell deeply in love with Iris Azulai, whom he remembers as the most beautiful girl in Jerusalem. They were each other’s first love and remained together for three happy years. Raz says the relationship gave him confidence and helped shape the man he became.
Then, in October 1990, shortly before his 19th birthday and while he was serving in the army, Iris was killed.
After spending the previous evening together, she left her home in Jerusalem’s Baka neighbourhood and was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist. When news spread of a stabbing in Baka, Raz was seized by the fear that Iris was the victim.
He called her brother, who told him to come at once. By the time Raz arrived, Iris had already been taken away. He never saw her body.
Raz believes Iris might have survived if another victim, a special-forces operative carrying a gun, had shot the attacker to kill rather than aiming at his knees.
Raz, who co-writes Fauda with Avi Issacharoff, ultimately chose to confront October 7 through two special episodes
For years, he kept the grief locked away. ‘It was the most painful thing that ever happened to me,’ he says. ‘I never spoke about Iris. It was a wound I was afraid to reopen.’
That changed when he and Issacharoff, who had also known Iris, began developing Fauda.
The first season, dedicated to Iris, includes a storyline in which the girlfriend of one of Doron’s colleagues is killed during a terrorist attack at a bar. The plot mirrors Raz’s own loss.
‘The way he reacted to her death was the way I reacted,’ Raz says. ‘Even the conversations they had were the conversations we had.’ Yet despite losing the woman he loved to terrorism, and despite the show’s recurring themes of revenge, Raz insists he never wanted vengeance.
‘I don’t want to hurt anyone else. I don’t want to become someone who does terrible things.’
Instead, he came to feel that Iris had entered his life for a purpose, even though their time together was tragically brief.
Creating Fauda, he believes, has also helped him face and understand his own trauma.
He remains deeply concerned about the emotional scars carried by a new generation of Israelis, including his own children.
‘I think all Israelis are living with post-traumatic stress. Even my children don’t like sleeping alone because they remember the missiles. They are frightened by the rockets and the sirens.’
Despite its Israeli origins, Fauda has also found a substantial audience across the Arab world. In Lebanon, it has reached the top of Netflix’s charts—something Raz sees as a hopeful sign for the Middle East.
‘I believe ordinary people want peace far more than their governments do,’ he says.
‘People in the streets of Lebanon and Israel are longing for peace. They want peace, and they want to know one another.’
Raz says it matters to him that Arab roles are played by Arab actors and Jewish roles by Jewish actors, creating what he describes as a ‘bubble of creativity and love’ during production.
He also rejects the idea that Fauda is Israeli propaganda. ‘It isn’t propaganda. Sometimes we are the villains, sometimes we are the heroes. Sometimes they are the heroes, and sometimes they are the villains.’
For now, the boundary between Raz and his famous character remains intriguingly indistinct.
‘Doron and Lior resemble each other in many ways, but they are also very different,’ he says.
‘Ultimately, though, I think both Doron and I would fight for our families and fight for our country.’