By David Nataf
On Netflix he is Saeed el-Hatib (or Saïd), the Marseille cell chief billed as the “Sinwar of Europe” — Hamas cover story, humanitarian front, the antagonist of Fauda Season 5. Off camera, French-Algerian actor Hakim Djaziri is looking for something quieter and more expensive: a foothold in Tel Aviv.
He said it plainly to the Jewish Chronicle after filming: he is back in Paris, returns often to see friends, and “I’d love to rent an apartment there.” On i24NEWS’s Défense with Matthias Inbar (16 September 2026), the same wish became a scoop — a pied-à-terre he wants to buy, because the friends he made on set pull him back for what he calls a recharge. He is still hunting. Tel Aviv, he notes, is particularly dear.
That is not a celebrity throwaway. It is the end of a path that began in Algeria’s Black Decade, passed through a French hard estate and a brief ideological radicalization, and was broken open by theatre — the art form he says literally saved him.
The casting he fought for
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 for him — ideology, psychology, motives. When he learned the team would scout in Marseille, he pressed for a half-hour in person: seven hours by train each way the same day from his village near the Spanish border. Risk, he implies, was part of wanting the role.
He had already 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: not a flat morality play, he argues, but a series that humanizes Palestinian civilians while drawing a hard line against the terrorists who hold them hostage.
Algeria, then France, then the stage
As a child he fled Algeria’s civil war and the decade of Islamist massacres. France meant a tough cité, school bullying, his parents’ social fall, and a teenage anger that looked for answers. Radical recruiters arrived with prefabricated ones. He insists the episode was ideological, not operational — he never harmed anyone, and if he had been a jihadist in the criminal sense he would not be sitting 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 on i24 to compare the child he was in Algeria with a child of 7 October, he does not soft-pedal: 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,” Shabbat, and a city that opened
Some online voices call him a traitor for working on an Israeli production. He says they are a minority beside messages of support, and 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.
What surprised him on the ground was Tel Aviv itself. He has said he did not know that about 23 percent of Israel’s population is Arab; the welcome shocked him. Avi Issacharoff has said that when war with Iran began, Djaziri stayed in Tel Aviv — as did French actress Mélanie Laurent, who also appears in the season — and that he fell in love with Israel. Djaziri himself describes two months of filming (roughly May–July) as a benevolent cacophony around a visceral trauma: almost everyone knows someone who was lost. He was invited to Shabbat meals. During the twelve days of Iranian missiles in June 2025 he lived the shelter routine; one night he arrived late at a bunker that had been kept open for him, and an elderly couple embraced him “as if I were their son.” What they want, he says, is to live in peace — and he cannot call that insincere.
Combat coordinator and reserve commander Yair Marton, on the same i24 panel, put the cultural point sharply: Fauda’s biggest audiences include Arab countries; Jewish and Muslim actors share coffee and meals for five seasons. Governments stall; sets sometimes build a bridge.
Why this belongs on Tel Aviv Apartment
Most coverage stops at the Netflix villain. The real estate detail is the tell. A man who once absorbed radical propaganda now wants keys in a city that stayed open under fire — rent first if he must, purchase if he finds it, knowing the price is steep. That is the Tel Aviv story in miniature in late 2026: soft sales talk elsewhere, rents still tense, and foreigners who tasted the city’s solidarity deciding the premium is worth paying.
Hamas remains the aggressor of 7 October and of the European cell Djaziri portrays. The actor’s choice is not to bleach that fact. It is to refuse the lie that working with Israelis, or wanting to live among them, makes you a traitor.
Sources
- i24NEWS Défense special — Fauda: Fiction/Reality (16 Sep 2026)
- i24NEWS write-up — Hakim Djaziri / Fauda S5
- Jewish Chronicle interview with Lior Raz / Issacharoff (Djaziri on renting in Israel)
- Paris Match; franceinfo portrait (6 Sep 2026); Netflix Tudum (Fauda S5 cast)
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