By El-Ya News Desk
On i24NEWS’s Défense (16 September 2026), Matthias Inbar opened against the narrative machine that paints the IDF as a cinema monster — then cut to an Israeli short, Fly Blind, in which a drone operator refuses the shot while civilians are exposed. Guests: Yair Marton, reserve commander and Fauda combat coordinator; and Hakim Djaziri, the French-Algerian actor cast as Saeed (Saïd), the Marseille cell chief billed as the “Sinwar of Europe” in Fauda Season 5 on Netflix.
The story is not only casting. When Iranian missiles hit in June 2025, Djaziri stayed in Tel Aviv. He lived the shelter routine. He was invited to Shabbat. Online, a minority called him a traitor for working with Israelis. On set, Marton says, Jewish and Muslim actors have shared coffee for five seasons — and Fauda’s biggest audiences include the Arab world. The apartment hunt comes later: a closing beat, not the whole hook.
The role he fought to play
Djaziri first auditioned for a smaller part. Production steered him toward Saeed. The search spanned several countries. In a video callback with director Omri Givon he said the character held no secrets — ideology, psychology, motives. Learning the team would scout Marseille, he insisted on a half-hour in person: seven hours by train each way the same day from his village near the Spanish border.
He had watched the first four seasons three times. After 7 October 2023 he did not flinch from playing a terrorist figure. For an actor, he told Inbar, that kind of part is “manna.” What he needed were human and artistic guarantees. He found them in how Fauda is written: humanizing Palestinian civilians while drawing a hard line against the terrorists who hold them hostage. Hamas remains the aggressor of 7 October and of the European cell the character fronted under a humanitarian cover.
Black Decade, radical pitch, theatre
As a child he fled Algeria’s civil war and the decade of Islamist massacres. France meant a tough estate, school bullying, his parents’ social fall, teenage anger hunting answers. Radical recruiters arrived with prefabricated ones. He insists the episode was ideological, not operational — he never harmed anyone; if he had been a jihadist in the criminal sense he would not be on a news set. Theatre cut the cord. For more than fifteen years he has used stage work and civic projects to explain how lost young men are pulled in.
Asked to compare the child he was in Algeria with a child of 7 October, he refuses soft language: the same climate of fear, the same gratuitous horror against people who refused the ideology — “the same process and the same horror,” endured in Algeria for more than ten years.
Traitor? Bridge.
Some online voices call him a traitor for denouncing terrorism and for appearing in an Israeli series. He isolates first the harm done to Muslims who want to live their faith in spiritual intimacy, and refuses the amalgam. The traitor voices, he says, are a minority beside messages of support; he will still talk to anyone who wants to understand.
Refusing the job because the producers were Israeli would have been, in his words, an insult to his values and to art — and he could not look his ten-year-old daughter in the eye while teaching her that fear is a bad companion.
Marton, hearing the arc for the first time on air, cuts clean: not a traitor — a courageous actor. Where does Fauda land hardest? In Arab countries — Emirates, Lebanon, Iran, Turkey. Are all those viewers traitors too? On set for five seasons, Muslim and Jewish actors work, eat, drink coffee together. Governments stall; film sometimes builds the bridge.
Under Iranian fire — June 2025
Inbar’s scoop: Djaziri was in Tel Aviv in June 2025 while Iranian missiles fell. He did not leave — hope of resuming the shoot, and a familiarity with war that surprised him when he found it again. Twelve anxious days, even for Israelis; solidarity received. Avi Issacharoff has said that when war with Iran began, Djaziri stayed — as did French actress Mélanie Laurent, who also appears in the season — and that he fell in love with Israel.
Djaziri describes two months of filming (roughly May–July) as a benevolent cacophony around visceral trauma: almost everyone knows someone who was lost. Shabbat meals. One night he arrived late at a bunker kept open for him; an elderly couple embraced him “as if I were their son.” What they want is to live in peace — and he cannot call that insincere.
He has said he did not know that about 23 percent of Israel’s population is Arab; the welcome shocked him.
Marton, closing, dismissed squeamish commentary on the hard episodes and conspiracy theories that treat 7 October as pretext: when the horror is at your door and the threat is global, you keep showing it until consciences move. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are the aggressors; Israeli fiction here still distinguishes civilian from terrorist — when so many Western stages do the reverse.
Closing beat: keys in Tel Aviv
Only then the real-estate line. Back in Paris, Djaziri returns often to see friends. To the Jewish Chronicle he said he’d love to rent an apartment there. On Défense the wish sharpened: a pied-à-terre to buy if he finds one — Tel Aviv is dear — to come back and recharge. Most coverage stops at the Netflix villain. The stay under Iranian fire, the Shabbat tables, the bunker door left open, and Marton’s bridge argument are the story. Wanting keys is what follows when a city shows you who it is.
Sources
- i24NEWS Défense special — Fauda: Fiction/Reality (16 Sep 2026)
- i24NEWS write-up — Hakim Djaziri / Fauda S5
- Jewish Chronicle (Djaziri on renting in Israel)
- Paris Match; franceinfo portrait (6 Sep 2026); Netflix Tudum (Fauda S5 cast)
- Times of Israel (Yair Marton profile)