The leaders of Hamas’s armed wing decide to launch a major attack that, in the words of one of them, “will surprise the enemy (Israel) and change the rules of the game.” Only a handful of people know the details, which they have been preparing for some time: it consists of knocking down the control towers at the border barrier, placing bombs under armored vehicles to capture hostages and taking over a military base. No, this is not reality, nor is it about the days before the attack that the Islamist militia launched on October 7, 2023, leaving almost 1,200 dead, capturing 251 hostages and unleashing a bloody invasion (40,000 Palestinians dead) that has set the Middle East on fire like never before in half a century. It is The fist of the freea fictional series filmed a year earlier in Gaza by the Hamas government itself with the explicit aim of competing with Faudathe hit Israeli series on Netflix about a group of mistaravimthe elite unit that is trained to blend in with the Palestinians. So much so that the mistaravim In the Hamas series they have, coincidentally, a bald leader and a woman, as in Fauda.
The series – which bears the name of the macro-operation that Hamas is preparing in fiction – was broadcast during the holy month of Ramadan (when Muslims around the world get hooked on series) in 2022. First on Al Aqsa, the satellite television of the Islamist movement; and then on Al Manar, that of the Lebanese party-militia Hezbollah. Its 30 chapters, of about 50 minutes, passed without pain or glory.
If it has now been resurrected, it is not because of its ―debatable― quality, but because of the clues of what was coming on October 7 (taking advantage of the fiction label) that some see a posteriori. Tanks burning on the border, fighting between soldiers and militiamen… Some sequences of The fist of the free The footage seems to be taken straight from the real attack. As the offensive begins, an Israeli commander clutches his head: “The country is experiencing a serious and very unusual event that we cannot explain. The headquarters in the south is in the line of fire. What is happening is totally abnormal. We have no satellites, no planes, no drones.” It is believed that at the time of the filming, Hamas was already secretly preparing for the Al-Aqsa Flood.
The clues are not so much in the recording (looking for prophecies after the event is always opportunistic and deceitful) as in some phrases that today seem to take on a different meaning. They were uttered, when introducing the series, by none other than Yahia Sinwar, the mastermind behind Al Aqsa’s Deluge and Israel’s number one enemy, whom Hamas has just named political leader after the assassination of Ismail Haniya in Tehran. “I applaud the efforts of all of you who have created and worked on this series. Your work brings us closer to liberation. This series is an integral part of what we are preparing in the Brigades (of Ezedin Al Qasam, the armed wing of Hamas). From the weapons produced in laboratories to the plans and capabilities to obtain intelligence information,” he said before personally presenting the awards to the team. At that time, the Israeli intelligence services condescendingly disdained the signs and warnings.
The series is inspired by a true story: a failed Israeli undercover operation in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza, in 2018. In reality, they were discovered by local residents, who suspected people whom no one knew. It ended in a confrontation in which the Israelis came out much better: they rescued 16 men, killed seven Palestinians and lost only one agent.
In the Hamas production, which can still be found on the Internet, the story changes. It is the target himself, Abu Anas, who realizes that he is being pursued and goes out to fight. Faudawould be a very bad guy; here, he is a loving, affable, smiling family man who sacrifices his life “for the liberation of Palestine.” He fights bravely, but is shot in the neck with a sedative dart. Hamas then launches the operation, with volleys of rockets, just as it really did at dawn on October 7, as a decoy for mass infiltration.
“Changing the rules of the game”
“We have managed to break the myth that the enemy army is invincible (…). The Fist of the Free must be our plan to surprise the enemy and change the rules of the game. Everyone will know the Fist of the Free,” says one of the leaders in the series, after scolding the militiamen in a training session for going out to capture soldiers in a tank without first knocking down the control towers. Something they did do on October 7.
Unlike FaudaIsraeli agents are rather clumsy. If in real life, Palestinian arrestees are stripped, handcuffed and made to lie down for hours with their eyes covered and their knees on the ground, here an elite unit spends hours without realizing that Abu Anas is carrying a knife hidden in his sock.
Some shots are filmed with GoPro cameras, attached to the body, so they look even more like those filmed in real life by the militiamen and which have been circulating in recent months. All with a lot of dramatic music, lots of underlining and a lot of slow motion, in the pure style of popular series in the Arab world.
Hamas created an artistic production department after taking control of Gaza in 2007. Its head, Mohammed Soraya, admitted to Al Jazeera in 2022 that The fist of the free sought to “show the point of view of the Palestinian resistance and the fighting spirit to resist the occupation,” to counter the “deception” and “great influence on the public” of Fauda. “Netflix is supporting the Zionist occupation by producing many series like Faudawhich portray the Palestinian people as criminals,” he added.
The series has all the limitations of having been shot in a Gaza under blockade. There are no studios, so they filmed for half a year only in natural settings and during the day. They lacked equipment for night shots. On one occasion, Israeli soldiers opened fire on the set, thinking it was real. Some of the shots were filmed with the cameraman standing on the shoulders of another. The budget: 78,000 euros.
Many of the actors were amateurs and obviously there were no Israelis to play them, unlike Fauda, where the Palestinian characters speak Arabic and the Israelis speak Hebrew (or Arabic, when they are on a special operation or joking around with each other). It’s like those Hollywood movies where everyone speaks English to each other abroad. Zohair Al-Belbisi, the 65-year-old actor who plays a Shin Bet officer, looks more Egyptian than Israeli, but he met with former prisoners to prepare for the role.
Beyond its prophetic character or not, the series is a window into the Palestinian Islamist universe. The family is the center and support of the warriors. Women must watch their movements so as not to give clues to the enemy. One protagonist flatters his son by calling him Ezedín Al Qasam, the influential preacher who fought to expel the British, French and Zionists from the Middle East and from whom the armed wing of Hamas takes its name.
Some dialogues are more like harangues to the viewer to raise morale: “Of course the enemy has a sophisticated arsenal, but we have an unbreakable will. Yes, they are powerful, they fight, but they fear dying. We do not, and we believe that God will give us victory.”
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