French historian who made it into Gaza tells Israeli media of Israel’s crimes

Haaretz recounts what Prof Jean-Pierre Filiu found when he got into Gaza and why Israel won’t allow western journalists in

Israeli newspaper Haaretz has carried testimony from a French historian of Gaza who managed to get through Israel’s blockade and into Gaza – and reported that after what he found there, he knew why Israel won’t allow international journalists into Gaza to report on its “appalling” reality.

In December last year, after more than a year of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people of Gaza, Prof Jean-Pierre Filiu arrived in Amman and made his way to the border with Israel, where he boarded a bus carrying a group of French volunteer doctors on their way into the Gaza Strip. As Haaretz relates, they:

entered the Strip through the Kerem Shalom crossing, where the group was met by officials of the United Nations. He was permitted to bring medications for personal use only, and up to three kilograms (6.6 pounds) of food. Filiu spent a month in the bombarded Strip. The book he wrote about that experience, titled “Un historien à Gaza,” was published in France in late May (an English translation, “A Historian in Gaza,” is forthcoming January 2026).

The first thing that struck Jean-Pierre Filiu when he entered the Gaza trip was that he didn’t recognise anything. All the points of reference he was familiar with from his many past visits had been destroyed. He became totally disoriented. Streets, sidewalks, buildings, whole cities – it was all a vast heap of rubble.

Filiu then touches on the human dignity of the Palestinians and how it was being eroded by Israel’s grotesquely illegal starvation blockade:

‘Mourning is frozen, never whole’, Filiu says, describing the current phenomenon in the Strip of residents writing the names of the dead on the ruins of homes, in the rubble itself, as a sort of memorial. If the deceased is a boy or a girl, a little drawing is usually added next to the name.

Despite the children’s abject hunger, Filiu relates that he saw them sharing bits of food with scrawny stray cats. When he asked them why they were doing that, they explained to him that they know what it feels like to be hungry and didn’t want the cats to feel like that.

One reason for the sharp deterioration in the social fabric of the Strip that he witnessed is the immense hunger there. “Even those who want to snare food with others cannot do so beyond the close, and hungry, family circle,” he says. “In the past, Gazan solidarity was high; the uncles and aunts, and the cousins, were very close to one another. Now everyone is focused on the small, dying, family circle.”

For his part, Filiu says during our conversation he saw in Gaza a place where “international law, basic human rights, the Geneva Convention, the attitude toward human rights – all are being tossed aside without hesitation and being supplanted by raw, random and very violent force.”

Filiu described the attempts of the Palestinian people to cling to civilisation and humanity – and the varying and unpredictable ways people were killed:

Another sight that affected Filiu deeply was that of the medical clowns who continued to visit the hospitals and improvised clinics in an agonizing effort to bring at least a glimpse of a smile to the faces of the wounded and the sick.

“I prefer to cling to the fragments of life that surface from this frenzied ship,” he writes about his experiences. “Little girls, with schoolbags on their back, emerge from a lower alley, where they learn in an institution supported by the Sultanate of Oman. A survivor, whose tent is stuck in the ruins, preserves the cleanliness of his shelter by emptying pails of refuse on the threshold of his ‘door.’ A family finds a haven on the top floor of a wrecked building, its laundry drying on a shaky balcony. Tents cast shadows of green, blue and red on the dull gray surroundings.”…

In addition to innumerable deaths of Gazans caused by all manner of weaponry, Filiu also witnessed mortality caused by infection and disease, and the near impossibility of preserving a semblance of hygiene: Almost every person he met suffered from disease and diarrhea. Women are affected more seriously than men by the severe deterioration in sanitary conditions: They tend to suffer more from skin and digestive tract infections, and account for two-thirds of the victims of hepatitis.

“Every basic human need here is a struggle for survival,” the historian writes. “A reality of open garbage dumps bustling with barefoot children. Holes dug in the sand as toilets, with a simple covering of canvas sheets to maintain an illusion of privacy. Home wells dug hastily in a corner of the tent.”

Even the weather takes a fatal toll. Filiu tells his readers about a baby girl named Sila who on Christmas Eve died of the cold at the age of three weeks. During his time in Gaza he heard about five other young children who perished from the cold.

“Dangerous blindness”

Dangerous blindness

In normal times, Filiu is a professor and researcher in the history department at the Sciences Po university in Paris. Besides his academic activity, he also writes a weekly analysis column about the Middle East and the Arab world in Le Monde. A prolific author, his best-selling and most widely translated book to date is “Gaza: A History,” originally published in 2012 (English second edition, Oxford University Press; 2024). In 2019 he published a political biography of Benjamin Netanyahu titled “Main basse sur Israël: Netanyahou et la fin du rêvesioniste” (“Seizing Israel: Netanyahu and the End of the Zionist Dream” (in French).

None of his books have been translated into Hebrew, not even the Netanyahu biography. Filiu hopes that “Un historien à Gaza,” which he wrote at lightning speed, will be published in Hebrew. It is important to him that Israelis read about what is being done in their name. He says the royalties from the sales of the book, in French and English – it is also being translated into Italian, Portuguese, Swedish and other languages – will be donated to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), the NGO with which Filiu entered Gaza…

One of most acute examples of that blindness, which Filiu terms a “tragic paradox,” is Israel’s support for the Abu Shabab gang in the Strip, which exercises violent control over the precious little humanitarian aid that enters Gaza, loots the trucks and does battle with Hamas. The majority of the Israeli public became aware of the existence of this criminal group only recently, in the wake of reports that Israel is arming its members. Not surprisingly, this situation is wreaking additional chaos on top of what already exists in Gaza. Filiu saw this very process unfolding before his eyes…

The professor goes on to describe at first hand the ISIS-linked gang that Israel arms and funds to help its predations on the people:

“It’s 2:30 A.M., when I wake up from heavy gunfire,” he writes about the night of December 4, when he witnessed a gunfight between unidentified security people guarding an aid convoy and a gang of looters, who were aided by IDF drones. The incident claimed 11 lives – five killed by the army and six in the exchange of fire between Hamas and Abu Shabab – plus 50 aid trucks out of 70 in the convoy were looted. The stolen goods, Filiu relates, showed up the next day in the Muwasi market and were sold at exorbitant prices.

“This vicious circle of organized crime is bringing about a rise in prices of basic commodities in the markets of Gaza, and this in turn encourages the participation of ordinary citizens in organized looting,” Filiu writes. “Every day around the end of 2024 brings its portion of gangs that attack humanitarian convoys, improvised road barriers erected by highway robbers, children who grab hold of trucks in order to steal a bag or two of flour.”

Israel’s very support of the Abu Shabab gang, Filiu explains, is actually strengthening Hamas. “Against the backdrop of the intense hunger in Gaza, Hamas’ punishment of the plundering gangs is accepted with understanding by the civilian population – they are angry at the looters and see Hamas as being bent on trying to stop the plunder of the little food that might reach them. Everybody in Gaza hates these gangs. Most of them are ostracized openly by their families. The idea of Israel relying on total outcasts to control territory is very disturbing. I’m not even talking from an ethical viewpoint, only an operational one.”

He says that when he somehow ended up in the vicinity of members of Abu Shabab, whom he describes as genuine gangsters who act in a threatening and totally erratic manner, he felt for the first time a real sense of danger from Gazans, rather than from Israelis and their bombs.

And he tells how the meaning of language is twisted by Israel as yet another means of dehumanising the Palestinians – and how they are treated by Israel like lab rats on whom the weapons and tactics of oppression and extermination can be trialled:

Part of that same zone is now categorized “red,” meaning its inhabitants are required to leave because “the humanitarian space is diminishing.”

“It’s a nice way of saying that the Gazans are treated like objects. The thought that they have to move again is terrible. People had to move and lost everything five times on average,” he says, since the start of the war. “And that’s only the average. I met people who had to move 10 times.”

But perhaps the most appalling conclusion from Filiu’s experiences is that Gaza is the “laboratory of the future.” “This is not a regional conflict, it’s a glimpse into tomorrow,” he says.

This sentiment echoes what Pep Guardiola, manager of the Manchester City football club, said last month: that when he looks at the children of Gaza, he is afraid that his children will be next in line.

“Maybe we think that we see the boys and girls of 4 years old being killed [in Gaza] by the bomb or being killed at the hospital because it’s not a hospital anymore. It’s not our business,” Guardiola said, upon receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester. “But be careful. The next one will be ours. The next 4- or 5-year-old kids will be ours. Sorry, but I see my kids when I wake up every morning since the nightmare started with the infants in Gaza. And I’m so scared.”

As so often, from the realities of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, to its slaughter of medics and journalists, to its deliberate killing of British aid workers, to its mass slaughter of hundreds of its own citizens on 7 October 2023, the Israeli press is more honest about what is being done by the genocidal occupation than the UK media and the Starmer government.

Like the many medical staff and humanitarian workers who have testified what they have seen in Gaza, Prof Filiu has pulled back the curtain on Israel’s terrorism and land theft. The UK ‘mainstream’ media and the British establishment are determined to do everything they can to pull that curtain closed again.

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