This is not Netflix, it is the Gaza war

“I'm a little tired, but I'm fine, working for everyone's safety,” he said, smiling and dressed in a campaign uniform, to the reporter from Israeli television Channel 12 who was interviewing him on Monday in the same Gaza Strip. Shortly after, the reservist Idan Amedi, 35, He was evacuated by air with his body destroyed by shrapnel after a clash with Hamas militiamen in the direction of the Sheba hospital in Tel Aviv, the largest and best equipped in Israel. A famous singer in his country, Amedi is also an actor known globally as a member of the main cast of the series Fauda, distributed by Netflix. Intubated and anesthetized, his situation was considered stable this Tuesday by doctors, who do not fear for his life, according to his relatives, after having been operated on for hours due to pieces of shrapnel lodged in various parts of your body.

Way to the fifth season, Fauda is a television plot that has narrated since 2015 the tribulations of a commando of the mistaarvim (those who live among the Arabs, in Hebrew) who operates covertly in the Palestinian territories. Amedi plays the fictional soldier Sagi Tzur, by far the tallest in the unit, headed by the impulsive commander Doron Kabilio, Lior Raz in real life, undisputed star and co-author of the series. When Amedi was mobilized after the attack launched by Hamas on October 7, he was quick to warn through social networks: “This is not a scene of Fauda, This is the real life”.

Married with two children, despite his international celebrity, he joined the 300,000 Israelis between the ages of 21 and 45 called up to fight in the Gaza war, the largest conflict recorded in Israel in half a century. Thousands of reservists have been demobilized since the beginning of this year, once the army has declared the Hamas military structure in the north of the Strip dismantled. But Amedi still had a mission to fulfill. He belongs to an engineering unit specialized in the demolition and destruction of tunnels. “We have located kilometers of tunnels, it is crazy,” he explained to the journalist from Israel's main private television network who interviewed him before he was injured.

In it part of casualties that the Armed Forces distribute each day —and which the press reports in detail—nine names appeared this Tuesday, a figure higher than average. Eight of them were officers with ages ranging between 23 and 35 years old. Only one, precisely the one who did not belong to the engineering corps, was 19 years old, during the period of mandatory military service. The conflict is leaving a deep mark on the young generations of Israelis who had barely known hostilities during their existence, except for the 2006 Lebanon war, which lasted just one month (119 soldiers killed) or the 2014 Gaza war, which lasted two months. months (67 deaths). In the three months of the current conflict, 519 Israeli soldiers have been killed, most in the large-scale Hamas offensive. Since the beginning of the invasion of the enclave, three weeks later, the army has recorded 185 deaths in its ranks and 2,438 seriously injured. Minor injuries are not recorded.

Amedi had taken advantage of his popularity to spread his activities on the combat front on social networks. Just two days ago, he distributed a message in which he claimed that his unit continued to destroy Hamas tunnels on a daily basis. In December he published images of the demolition of a school in Gaza that had allegedly served as a military post for the Palestinian militia. Three weeks ago, he announced the demolition of a building in the Strip, in an action by his engineering unit in memory of the Israeli victims of the October 7 attack.

'The pain of the warrior'

As a singer who became famous in Israel after participating in a contest for young performers, the co-star of Fauda triumphed on the local sales charts with the song The pain of the warrior, which describes the experience of a soldier with post-traumatic combat syndrome upon his return from the front. Born and raised in Jerusalem in a Kurdish Jewish family of Iraqi origin, Amedi had announced last November that he was going to stop acting and singing for a year to fulfill his mission as a reservist.

The plot of the third part of Fauda He got lost precisely in the Gaza Strip, along the path of unbridled action in which any resemblance to reality was purely coincidental. Jewish soldiers and settlers left the Palestinian coastal enclave almost 20 years ago, which was shortly after subjected to a land and sea blockade. Troops only returned in the course of sporadic wars.

At its premiere, Fauda It opened a breach in the wall of ignorance about daily life in Palestine erected before Israeli society itself by a conflict more than seven decades old. But the ignorance of the Hebrew scriptwriters about the Gazan reality of 2020 was evident after the “disconnection” of 2005, the withdrawal of settlers and troops, the subsequent blockade and the wars that broke out in 2007, when the Islamist movement Hamas took over. with power in the Strip.

Lior Raz, the lead actor, is a veteran of the covert security operations of the Shin Bet (internal intelligence services) and the army in the West Bank. He co-wrote the series with journalist Avi Issacharoff, former Palestinian affairs correspondent for the newspaper Haaretz and who was previously his comrade in the mistaarvim. The two ran together from their homes in Tel Aviv on October 7 to help the victims of the Hamas offensive with their own means. Raz has now wished Hope a speedy recovery in a video distributed through their social networks.

Since it shot up to 35% of the gross domestic product after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Defense budget has continued to decline in Israel, reaching 3.3% today. The Armed Forces had cut the length of military service – mandatory for both men and women – and the annual service time of reservists over the past two decades. Israel is now considering returning to the model of three years of service for men and about two years for women, between the ages of 18 and 21. Reservists in combat units will also be required to mobilize up to 40 days annually starting in 2025. In the midst of hostilities in Gaza, younger generations of Israelis are learning — like their fathers in the Yom Kippur trenches and their grandparents in the Six Days war in 1967—that war is not a fictional series.

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