There are some phone calls you remember for the rest of your life. And for Lior Raz, it came in the early morning of October 7, 2023.

The Israeli actor, one of the nation’s biggest stars who helped create Netflix’s smash-hit espionage drama Fauda, listened helplessly from a Romanian hotel room as his sister described being trapped in the shelter of a kibbutz near the Gaza border as rockets rained down.

Some 1,000 miles away from the devastating events unfolding in his home country, and spared the news of Hamas’s deadly massacre until that moment, he could barely comprehend what he was hearing.

‘My sister said: “Lior, you need to save me because I’m with my kids at the shelter. There are terrorists around us”,’ recalls Raz, 54, speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday.

‘I didn’t know what she was talking about… She said: ‘Look at your camera. Look at your phone. Look at your TV.’ And then I saw all those horrible videos that we have all seen.’

Millions of fans of Fauda around the world, of course, will know Raz as Doron Kavillio from the explosive political thriller. The character is one of Israel’s elite undercover commandos, defined by a relentless drive to hunt down enemy forces – sometimes at the expense of his own family life.

The show, now in its fifth season since first airing in 2015, became an international sensation because of its dizzying plot twists, bloodshed, betrayals and brutal undercover missions.

Lior Raz, who stars in Fauda and is one of Israel’s most famous actors, has told the Daily Mail of the harrowing phone call he received from his sister on October 7 

Lior Raz and Lucy Ayoub in Netflix’s smash hit espionage drama Fauda

But on the day that is now etched into global memory, when Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage, the terrifying world Raz had spent years portraying on screen came crashing into his own life.

Images of Israelis being snatched, such as Noa Argamani from the Nova music festival, showed almost in real time how the gunmen were causing chaos.

It says much for Raz’s own real-life military training – he was once a covert operative for Israeli counterterrorism unit Duvdevan – that his immediate instincts were to return home, and protect his sister and her family at all costs.

And although his sister was safe by the time he was able to return to Israel the following day, the actor says he felt ‘like a lion in a cage’, frustrated by his inability to help. So he travelled to the south of the country and threw himself into action, joining Israeli volunteer organisations Brothers and Sisters In Arms to help evacuate families trapped in their homes.

‘I took my Jeep and my gun, and I went down to the south because there were still terrorists,’ he says. ‘There were missiles. Families were stuck in their houses. They needed to be rescued.

‘You don’t think about it… whether you’d die or not. It was just there’s things that you feel that you have to do.’ The words could have come from Doron Kavillio himself.

Indeed, in Israel he is so instantly recognisable as the complex hero that it led to some moments of surreal comedy that day.

‘I’m knocking on the door of someone. I’m with my gun, and there are missiles,’ he recalls.

Raz stars as Doron Kavillio from the explosive political thriller. The character is one of Israel’s elite undercover commandos, defined by a relentless drive to hunt down enemy forces

Images of Israelis being snatched, such as Noa Argamani (pictured) from the Nova music festival, showed almost in real time how the gunmen were causing chaos

‘They see me, and they get confused, and, you know, ‘Doron, what are you doing here?’ They thought that they were in a scene from Fauda.’

But the experience, so intensely personal, has never left him. ‘It was the hardest day ever. There has not been one day since – not one day – I haven’t thought about it.’ The events inspired the fifth series of Fauda, with some of the most moving scenes ever streamed on Netflix.

Raz, who also writes the show with Avi Issacharoff, made the difficult decision to tell the story of October 7 for two special episodes.

It took a huge emotional toll on the cast and crew, who all knew someone who had died or been wounded. Production team member Matan Meir was killed in November 2023 while serving as an Israel Defence Forces reservist in Gaza. Actor Idan Amedi had a luckier escape in the IDF, but he’d still been caught in an explosion in January 2024 which left him with burns and shrapnel wounds to his eye sockets, jaw and neck.

Soldiers heading into Gaza also passed the set during filming.

‘For me, as an actor, to be there again, to play and to act in the same situation that really happened in real life was very hard,’ Raz says. ‘We felt that we’re doing something much more important than shooting a show.’

Some scenes, understandably, were almost unbearable.

In one, Doron, unable to remember eight entire hours of October 7, visits a therapist – a storyline based on a real survivor known to the writers who suffered a similar loss of memory.

Raz was over 1,000 miles away from the devastating events unfolding in his home country, and spared the news of Hamas’s deadly massacre until that moment, he could barely comprehend what he was hearing

The cast of Fauda. The attack in 2023 took a huge emotional toll on the cast and crew, who all knew someone who had died or been wounded

‘I broke down. I cried a lot,’ Raz tells the MoS. ‘I went out. It was a very hard scene for me.’

Watching the finished episodes, Raz – who is a father of four and married to Israeli actress Meital Berdah – struggles to separate his performance from his own real-life experience. ‘I see that it’s not me acting. It’s me being in the situation, and there is no acting there.’

Another harrowing scene was one recreating the fate of young Israelis who sought refuge from Hamas militants in a rubbish container during the attacks.

Believing they had found somewhere to hide, the terrified youngsters were trapped when the attackers discovered them and opened fire, leaving their bodies piled up inside.

In Raz’s retelling of the tragedy, Doron climbs into the container and is confronted by the scene.

‘The container story is real, something that really happened,’ he says. ‘And to be there was the hardest thing ever.’

Raz and Issacharoff deliberately held back from showing the full brutality of October 7, fearing that recreating the atrocities too graphically would further traumatise Israeli viewers.

When the episodes aired, they were accompanied by warnings that they might be too distressing and those watching had the option to skip them altogether.

The fifth season of Fauda deliberately held back from showing the full brutality of October 7, fearing that recreating the atrocities too graphically would further traumatise Israeli viewers

Hamas fighters on a glider during the October 7 attacks 

But the decision prompted an unexpected reaction from some viewers – many of them Arab – who criticised the watering down of history.

He says: ‘We try to be very sensitive. We didn’t want to do a snuff movie. It’s supposed to be delicate. It’s supposed to be something watchable.’ And there, he has certainly struck gold. Fauda is a huge global hit, ranking among Netflix’s top ten most-watched series in over 40 countries.

Remarkably, despite writing the role of Doron Kavillio specifically for himself, Raz almost didn’t get the chance to play its most famous character.

When he and Issacharoff took the series to Israeli broadcaster Yes, TV executives initially wanted a big name to take the lead. So Raz decided to audition.

When faced with the final two contenders, the director reportedly posed a simple question to the casting team.

‘They’re both amazing actors, but who are you going to follow in war? Who are you gonna walk after?’

The answer was unanimous. ‘All the people that were in the room voted for me,’ says Raz. ‘So I got the role.’

It’s perhaps unsurprising: confronting terrorists as Doron was hardly unfamiliar ground for the actor. He had been trained for precisely such dangers during his service in Duvdevan, whose soldiers sometimes disguised themselves as Palestinian civilians to capture wanted terrorists. Afterwards, he even did a stint as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodyguard.

The Daily Mail’s Natalie Lisbona with Lior Raz   

Fauda draws heavily on his experiences undercover. But Raz is reluctant to reveal the real-life missions that inspired the explosive storylines. ‘I have to protect the unit,’ he explains. ‘What I can tell you is that this is one of the amazing, best units of special forces in the world.’

Another deeply personal tragedy also inspired a heartbreaking storyline in the first series of Fauda – one Raz rarely talks about.

At 16, he fell hopelessly in love with a girl called Iris Azulai, who he describes as the most beautiful girl in Jerusalem. They were each other’s first love and spent three blissful years together. It was a relationship that, he says, gave him confidence and made him the man he is today.

But in October 1990, shortly before Raz’s 19th birthday and while he was serving in the army, tragedy struck.

After spending the previous evening together, Iris left her home in Jerusalem’s Baka neighbourhood in the morning and was knifed to death by a Palestinian terrorist. As details emerged

of a stabbing in Baka, he was overcome by a terrible sense of foreboding that Iris was the victim.

He telephoned her brother, who urged him to come immediately. By the time he arrived, Iris had been taken away. He never saw her body.

Iris might not have died, he believes, if one of the knifeman’s other victims, a special forces operative armed with a gun, had shot to kill rather than aiming for the terrorist’s knees.

Raz, who also writes the show with Avi Issacharoff, made the difficult decision to tell the story of October 7 for two special episodes

For years, he kept his grief buried. ‘It was the hardest thing that ever happened to me,’ he says. ‘I didn’t talk about Iris… It’s like a wound I didn’t want to open.’

But when he and Issacharoff, who had also known Iris, began writing Fauda, he finally confronted the topic.

In the first series, which is dedicated to Iris, a member of Doron’s unit is killed in a terrorist attack at a bar – a storyline drawn directly from Raz’s own loss. ‘The reaction to her death that he had was the same reaction that I had,’ says Raz. ‘The dialogue that they had was the same dialogue that we had.’ But despite losing the girl

he loved to a terrorist, despite the incidents of merciless vengeance in Fauda, Raz says he never wanted revenge.

‘I don’t want to hurt anyone else,’ he says. ‘You know I don’t want to be someone who’s just doing awful things.’

Instead, he came to believe that Iris had entered his life for a reason, however cruelly short their time together had been.

And Raz believes that the very act of creating Fauda has helped him come to terms with his own trauma.

He worries, however, about the psychological scars being left on a new generation of Israelis, including his own children.

‘I think Israelis are all post-traumatic. Even my kids, they don’t want to sleep alone because they remember the missiles. They’re afraid of the missiles and the sirens.’

Remarkably, Fauda has also become a huge success across the Arab world, including Lebanon, where it has topped the

Netflix charts – something which Raz believes reveals something hopeful about the future of the Middle East.

‘I think that the people are ready for peace much more than our governments,’ he says.

‘The people in the streets of Lebanon, in the streets of Israel, [are] craving for peace, they want peace. They want to know each other.’

It is important to him that Arab characters are played by Arab actors and Jewish characters by Jewish actors, creating what he calls a ‘bubble of creativity and love’ on set.

And he is adamant that Fauda is no exercise in Israeli propaganda. ‘It’s not propaganda. Sometimes we are the bad guys. Sometimes we are the good guys. Sometimes they are the good guys. Sometimes they are the bad guys.’

For now, though, the line between Raz and his on-screen alter ego remains fascinatingly blurred.

‘Doron and Lior are very similar in many ways, but they are very different in so many ways,’ he says.

‘But at the end of the day, I think Doron and I, both of us, will fight for our family and will fight for our country.’