An Israeli soldier who is an actor in the popular Israeli series “Fauda” on Netflix was seriously wounded when a truck filled with explosives blew up in the Bureij area of central Gaza on Monday, the Israeli military said.
The actor, Idan Amedi, 35, who is also well-known in Israel as a composer, songwriter and pop singer, was airlifted to a hospital in Israel, where he underwent extensive surgery to remove shrapnel from his body. His condition has improved now and he is expected to recover, Israeli news media reported.
Six soldiers were killed in the truck explosion and eight were wounded, including Mr. Amedi, the Israeli military said. Although the exact cause of the explosion had not been determined by Tuesday evening, a preliminary investigation suggested that it was inadvertently caused by fire from an Israeli tank, said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesman for the Israeli military.
For safety reasons, most soldiers had been ordered to leave the site where a small crew of combat engineers was preparing the explosives, Admiral Hagari said, and a tank was stationed nearby to secure the area and provide cover. Then the tank identified what was thought to be a threat.
“The tank opened fire at the threat, and in a tragic outcome, struck an electricity pole nearby, knocking it over and igniting the explosives,” Admiral Hagari said.
In “Fauda,” which has aired for four seasons on Netflix, Mr. Amedi plays Sagi Tzur, a newcomer to an elite Israeli counterterrorism unit that goes undercover into the occupied Palestinian territories, using the fighters’ fluency in Arabic and familiarity with local culture to blend in and hunt down terrorists.
As Israel launched a full-scale war in Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas, the show’s depiction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict gained urgency and other cast and crew members and their family members were called up to fight. In November, a producer on the show, Matan Meir, 38, was killed in a booby-trapped tunnel shaft near a mosque in northern Gaza.
Mr. Amedi rose to fame in 2010 after appearing on the popular Israeli TV show “A Star Is Born,” performing his song, “The Pain of Warriors,” which became an instant hit.
The song is written as a letter from a soldier on the front line to his lover, and reveals how much he has been keeping from her, “all the nightmares, the screams and blood on the uniform.”
Mr. Amedi has served as a reservist since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel. At the time, he wrote on his Instagram account that he would give up performing or singing for a year in order to remain in combat, saying the Israeli military needed to take action to protect Israelis in the south and the north, where cross-border attacks with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah have escalated.
“Anything other than the elimination of Hamas in Gaza and the uprooting of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon poses an immediate danger to our children,” he wrote.
Another video posted to his Instagram account shows Mr. Amedi, who was serving in a combat engineering unit, counting down before exploding a target and dedicating it to Oct. 7 victims and two comrades killed in combat. “We will avenge their blood,” he says in the video.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
