Fauda Season 5: October 7, Hamas and the Cycle of Revenge — A Muslim Viewer Reflects
By Zahack Tanvir
As Fauda confronts October 7 directly in its fifth season, a Muslim viewer reflects on what the series says about Hamas, Islam, Israeli trauma, intelligence warfare and the cycle of revenge consuming Israelis and Palestinians.
Warning: Spoiler alerts
I have watched Fauda from its earlier seasons, but Episodes 7 and 8 of the latest season stayed with me long after they ended. They are among the most sensitive episodes the series has ever produced because they confront the horrors of October 7 head-on. The episodes were considered sensitive enough to "carry special warnings for viewers", while the creators have explained that the fifth season itself had to be substantially reconsidered after the Hamas attack changed the reality in which the series was being written.
There is also something striking about watching these episodes as a Muslim. Fauda is unmistakably an Israeli series, telling the story through Israeli characters and Israeli trauma. Yet its latest season has also found a substantial audience across the Arab world, even "reaching the top of Netflix rankings in Lebanon". That makes the conversation around the series more interesting than a simple question of whether Israelis approve of its portrayal of October 7.
The Red-Green alliance may see almost any depiction of Hamas’s brutality as Israeli propaganda. But October 7 is not something Fauda invented for dramatic effect. The attack happened. Israelis were murdered and hostages were taken. There is also substantial evidence of sexual violence during the attack and against hostages in captivity. A "United Nations mission found reasonable grounds to believe" that rape and gang rape occurred in several locations on October 7 and clear and convincing information that some hostages were subjected to sexual violence.
The series uses that reality as the emotional engine of its story. What struck me more, however, was that the show did not reduce the conflict to Israelis versus Arabs, or Jews versus Muslims. Some of its most telling moments deliberately complicate that picture, and as a Muslim viewer, those were often the scenes I found most interesting.
Muslims Fighting Hamas
Yusuf is perhaps the clearest example. He comes to protect Eli’s wife Hagit and her children and ultimately pays for it with his life. When Hamas kills him at point-blank range, Yusuf recites the Kalima, Islam’s declaration of faith. It is a powerful scene because the Muslim character is not positioned as an enemy of Jews. He is killed while trying to protect them.
There is another subtle scene involving Yusuf’s father, Salem, and Eli. Both men have suffered devastating losses and are brought together by their desire to find those responsible. At one point, they pray together in the same room, each according to his own religious tradition. For me, that moment says a great deal about the distinction the series is trying to draw. Its target is Hamas and Islamist terrorism rather than Arabs or Muslims as a whole.
Yusuf also admonishes Hamas terrorists about the Prophet’s teachings on warfare, invoking prohibitions against harming women and children and against wanton destruction. The contrast is stark: a Muslim character appeals to Islamic principles while Hamas fighters ignore them. His death consequently carries a meaning beyond the immediate action. It becomes part of the show’s argument that Islam and Islamist violence should not be treated as interchangeable.
The European storyline extends that idea. Season 5 shows Europeans becoming radicalized and drawn into terrorism, demonstrating that jihadist violence does not necessarily remain confined to the societies from which these conflicts originate.
It also brought back memories of warnings from Gulf leaders, especially the UAE’s Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, about the consequences of allowing extremist ideologies to take root in Western societies. Speaking in Riyadh in 2017, he "warned that Europe could eventually produce growing numbers of radicals and terrorists" because of political correctness and the assumption that European governments understood Islam and the Middle East better than people from the region.
Watching Fauda nearly a decade later, that warning came back to me. As a Muslim, I do not think acknowledging the problem of Islamist extremism is somehow anti-Muslim. Islamist movements and jihadist organizations have devastated Muslim countries and killed enormous numbers of Muslims themselves. Distinguishing Islam from Islamism is therefore not simply something Western governments should do; Muslims have every reason to insist on that distinction ourselves.
Nobody Has Clean Hands in the Intelligence War
The most uncomfortable aspect of the season, for me, is its portrayal of intelligence operations. Israel’s Shin Bet recruits Maher Zeytoun, a Hamas commander involved in the October 7 operation, as an asset. Watching someone with blood on his hands become useful to the agency fighting Hamas is deliberately jarring.
But that is also what makes the storyline believable. Intelligence work rarely operates within neat moral boundaries. Agencies recruit people from hostile organizations because those people possess access, information and relationships that outsiders cannot easily obtain. The resulting alliances can be ugly, compromised and deeply uncomfortable. Fauda does not try to sanitize that reality.
Hamas plays a similar game in Europe. Its operatives cultivate contacts within European security structures and provide information about al-Qaeda and ISIS in an effort to gain credibility and access. The result is a complicated ecosystem in which terrorist organizations, intelligence agencies and informants constantly attempt to penetrate and manipulate one another.
The wider Middle Eastern context is equally important. The season’s references to Iranian-backed networks and Sunni jihadist groups reminded me that the region’s conflicts cannot be reduced to the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. Iran spent decades developing relationships with armed organizations across the Middle East, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and Iraqi militias, creating what has often been described as a regional “axis of resistance.” "Reporting on the network of Iran-aligned armed groups" has shown how these organizations became interconnected parts of a much broader regional struggle.
For many Arab governments, Iranian power projection has therefore become a strategic concern in its own right. This is also something "Mid.East Journal has examined in its coverage of Iran’s militia strategy", including the way Tehran has used armed non-state actors to expand its regional influence while weakening state institutions.
As a Muslim watching Fauda, I therefore did not see a simple story about Jews fighting Muslims. I saw competing Muslims, competing Arabs, competing interpretations of religion, and intelligence agencies and terrorist organizations all inhabiting the same complicated regional landscape.
Everyone Is Avenging Someone
Yet the strongest thread running through the season is revenge. Maher carries memories from childhood, including his love of going to the seaside to fish with his grandfather, who was later killed in strikes. Khatib carries another history of displacement, with his family escaping to Algeria before eventually returning. Their past becomes part of the justification for what they do in the present.
The Israeli characters are driven by their own losses. Doron, Eli, Steve and the others are responding to October 7 and to people they personally lost. One side remembers its dead and seeks revenge; the other remembers its dead and does the same.
That is where Fauda becomes more than another counterterrorism thriller. It shows how violence reproduces itself. Someone loses a family member, grows up with that memory, joins an organization, kills someone else’s family member and creates another person with a new reason for revenge. The cycle renews itself.
Interestingly, this is not simply my interpretation of the season. Co-creator Avi Issacharoff has said that "revenge became one of the central themes of Season 5", with the writers deliberately asking whether revenge actually changes reality or simply perpetuates a cycle that leads nowhere.
Eli’s private conversation with a Hamas recruit in a moving truck is particularly telling. He explains that Israel cannot simply pack its bags, take its nuclear arsenal, technology companies and institutions and disappear into the sea with a goodbye. Whatever one’s political position, there is a practical reality that every intifada activist and every maximalist movement has to confront: Israel exists as a state, and millions of people live there.
That does not resolve the Palestinian question. Palestinians also exist, have their own history and identity, and are not simply going to disappear either. But imagining that one side can somehow eliminate the other does not resolve the conflict. It guarantees that the next generation will inherit it.
And then there is Captain Gabi Ayub. His character remains one of the most recognizable parts of the series. He has gained weight, loves carbohydrates, runs a technology company and continues to recruit brilliant people. Lia, in particular, feels like a natural fit for the technical-intelligence world. Dana, meanwhile, represents a different kind of authority: a woman leading a major security unit without the series having to reduce her character to a statement about gender.
For me, that is what makes Season 5 engaging. It is violent, political and uncomfortable, but beneath the operations and firefights is a much older problem: how long can people continue avenging the previous generation before somebody decides that the cycle has to stop?
Perhaps that is also what stood out most to me watching the series as a Muslim. Muslims are not Hamas. Israelis are not simply soldiers. Palestinians are not one political movement. A Muslim character can die protecting a Jewish family, just as a Muslim father and Jewish father can pray in the same room while grieving their dead.
The reality is messier than the slogans surrounding this conflict, and Fauda, at its best, understands that.
Hats off to the Fauda team. Like its previous seasons, Season 5 is worth watching—not only for the action, but for the uncomfortable questions it leaves behind.
Zahack Tanvir is a strategic communications and national security commentator, entrepreneur and founder of Milli Chronicle UK. He is a columnist, TV panelist, podcast guest and public affairs commentator covering geopolitics, national security, international affairs and strategic narratives.