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A Historian in Gaza
‘The Gaza I knew, and whose length and breadth I’ve travelled, has ceased to exist.’
Jean-Pierre Filiu, acclaimed historian of Gaza, is intimately familiar with the land’s people and places; he speaks the local dialect. But nothing prepared him for what he encountered there in December 2024. This is his unforgettable, unbearably intimate account of one month in a place shattered by Israel’s all-out war.
When the historian returned to Gaza, he arrived under circumstances unimaginably different from his many past visits since 1980: only a limited number of convoys were allowed into the Strip, and he was one of the few humanitarians able to enter, this time by night. He remained inside for 33 days, and emerged determined to bear witness to the devastation—to the Gazans fighting simply to live, every single day.
Filiu’s haunting portrait of a land betrayed is a grim work of war reportage, documented with the acuity of a historian; and a lyrical narrative of human suffering, and human dignity.
Jean-Pierre Filiu, acclaimed historian of Gaza, is intimately familiar with the land’s people and places; he speaks the local dialect. But nothing prepared him for what he encountered there in December 2024. This is his unforgettable, unbearably intimate account of one month in a place shattered by Israel’s all-out war.
When the historian returned to Gaza, he arrived under circumstances unimaginably different from his many past visits since 1980: only a limited number of convoys were allowed into the Strip, and he was one of the few humanitarians able to enter, this time by night. He remained inside for 33 days, and emerged determined to bear witness to the devastation—to the Gazans fighting simply to live, every single day.
Filiu’s haunting portrait of a land betrayed is a grim work of war reportage, documented with the acuity of a historian; and a lyrical narrative of human suffering, and human dignity.
182 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 20, 2025
About the author
Jean-Pierre Filiu
48 books46 followersJean-Pierre Filiu (1961) is a French professor of Middle East studies at Sciences Po, Paris School of International Affairs, an Orientalist and an Arabist.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 28, 2026
Free Palestine 🇵🇸
March 30, 2026
Unfortunately, nothing in this book read as new information and didn't even really read as though it was coming from a historians perspective, it all felt like things you could learn from a very easy google search.
July 10, 2026
Jean-Pierre Filiu spent one month in Gaza from Dec 2024 to Jan 2025, primarily staying in Al Mawasi and Deir Al Balah, and instead of writing about that, he writes about events happening elsewhere in Gaza, in the news, or in the past. He talks a lot, for instance, about Beit Lahia, in the far north of Gaza. The problem is, in 2024-2025, he wasn’t in Beit Lahia, so all he can say about Beit Lahia is what he sees on the news, which means he isn’t providing anything new, or anything he can attest to from personal witness or experience. Even if there were less major events happening around him in Al Mawasi, less bombings and deaths, I still would have liked to hear more about what he actually experienced. He gives us brief snippets of information about people he met or spoke to, with little context. I would have preferred he expanded on those interactions. Talk more in depth about a few specific displaced families there who he might have gotten to know more. That would have offered more of the close, personal account from Gaza I was hoping to get from this book.
What’s worse than his lack of personal focus, is that he got some details wrong in his book. I would have expected someone as well-researched as him to not have this kind of oversight. For instance, he talks about Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, and the nearby Indonesian Hospital, which he says is in Jabalia. This is incorrect; the Indonesian Hospital is also in Beit Lahia just like Kamal Adwan, not in Jabalia, though it is close to Jabalia, so residents from Jabalia often go there. He says that the IDF found no evidence, or at least publicly provided none, that Hamas ever operated in Al Shifa Hospital. This is also incorrect, as there was security camera footage released of hostages being brought into Al Shifa Hospital on October 7, 2023, as well as testimonies from hostages speaking of being held captive in Al Shifa. He talks about the 2024 photo of Dr. Abu Safiya in his doctor’s jacket walking toward a tank, but has no knowledge of the 2016 photo of Dr Safiya attending a meeting in military uniform. I expect oversights from most books about Israel-Palestine, but I don’t expect these oversights from a well-researched historian.
A lot of this book discusses pieces of history of the Gaza Strip. I think mixing memoir and history can work in a book so long as both are fully developed. For example, The Gates of Gaza by Amir Tibon is half October 7 memoir and half history book, recounting the history of Israeli-Gazan relations through the history of the border kibbutz Nahal Oz. This works because he gives both memoir sections and history sections the chance to be fully fleshed out by giving them their own dedicated chapters. What Filiu does in this book, instead, is talk briefly about something happening in the present day, either happening around him or in the news, and then launch into a history lecture that this makes him think of. Because of this, the present day sections aren’t fleshed out like an actual memoir (especially because he spends so many of them talking about what’s happening in the north according to the news, instead of what he sees in the humanitarian zone). And, the history sections, instead of being a chronological story of Gaza, give us bits of facts, statistics, and events out of order. The result is that it doesn’t work as a memoir and doesn’t really work as a history book either.
The book, as a whole, isn’t that bad; there’s a reason I gave it three stars instead of two or one. There are things I learned from the book, such as about the clan system in Gaza and more details about the looting of aid trucks. But, the book isn’t as strong as it could’ve been, if he committed to writing more of a memoir, focused more on his personal eye-witness accounts and experiences instead of what he sees on the news, and found a way to separate the present day and historical accounts in order to let them both be more fleshed out.
If you’re looking for a memoir of an international volunteer who spent one month in Gaza, I’d recommend Dr. Salman Khalid’s Gaza: A Doctor’s Diary. Of the memoirs I’ve read from Palestinians in Gaza so far, my favorite is Who Will Tell My Story: A Gaza Diary by Anonymous. If you want a book that blends a present day Israel-Palestine memoir with Gaza’s history, I’d recommend The Gates of Gaza by Amir Tibon.
What’s worse than his lack of personal focus, is that he got some details wrong in his book. I would have expected someone as well-researched as him to not have this kind of oversight. For instance, he talks about Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, and the nearby Indonesian Hospital, which he says is in Jabalia. This is incorrect; the Indonesian Hospital is also in Beit Lahia just like Kamal Adwan, not in Jabalia, though it is close to Jabalia, so residents from Jabalia often go there. He says that the IDF found no evidence, or at least publicly provided none, that Hamas ever operated in Al Shifa Hospital. This is also incorrect, as there was security camera footage released of hostages being brought into Al Shifa Hospital on October 7, 2023, as well as testimonies from hostages speaking of being held captive in Al Shifa. He talks about the 2024 photo of Dr. Abu Safiya in his doctor’s jacket walking toward a tank, but has no knowledge of the 2016 photo of Dr Safiya attending a meeting in military uniform. I expect oversights from most books about Israel-Palestine, but I don’t expect these oversights from a well-researched historian.
A lot of this book discusses pieces of history of the Gaza Strip. I think mixing memoir and history can work in a book so long as both are fully developed. For example, The Gates of Gaza by Amir Tibon is half October 7 memoir and half history book, recounting the history of Israeli-Gazan relations through the history of the border kibbutz Nahal Oz. This works because he gives both memoir sections and history sections the chance to be fully fleshed out by giving them their own dedicated chapters. What Filiu does in this book, instead, is talk briefly about something happening in the present day, either happening around him or in the news, and then launch into a history lecture that this makes him think of. Because of this, the present day sections aren’t fleshed out like an actual memoir (especially because he spends so many of them talking about what’s happening in the north according to the news, instead of what he sees in the humanitarian zone). And, the history sections, instead of being a chronological story of Gaza, give us bits of facts, statistics, and events out of order. The result is that it doesn’t work as a memoir and doesn’t really work as a history book either.
The book, as a whole, isn’t that bad; there’s a reason I gave it three stars instead of two or one. There are things I learned from the book, such as about the clan system in Gaza and more details about the looting of aid trucks. But, the book isn’t as strong as it could’ve been, if he committed to writing more of a memoir, focused more on his personal eye-witness accounts and experiences instead of what he sees on the news, and found a way to separate the present day and historical accounts in order to let them both be more fleshed out.
If you’re looking for a memoir of an international volunteer who spent one month in Gaza, I’d recommend Dr. Salman Khalid’s Gaza: A Doctor’s Diary. Of the memoirs I’ve read from Palestinians in Gaza so far, my favorite is Who Will Tell My Story: A Gaza Diary by Anonymous. If you want a book that blends a present day Israel-Palestine memoir with Gaza’s history, I’d recommend The Gates of Gaza by Amir Tibon.
Review of advance copy
This book may be short but it is an essential read for those who want to try to understand what people like you and me go through when trapped in a war zone. Jean-Pierre Filiu is a French professor of Middle East studies at Sciences Po, Paris School of International Affairs and he spent a month in Gaza with Médecins Sans Frontières. Nothing prepared him for what he observed and he admits himself that he was protected from the worst - he always had access to clean water, food and a warm place to sleep. Nevertheless, Jean-Pierre Filiu attempts to portray an accurate, balanced account of what he did witness. Filiu is not naïve and refuses to take sides. For example, he condemns ‘Israel’s endless war against Gaza, rather than Hamas’ while recognising that Hamas’s frustration at not being able to fight the “Zionist enemy” was vented by ‘military aggression on their own people’. In reality, most of those living in Gaza just want to get on with their lives but are enduring the ‘nightmare within a nightmare of Islamist domination under Israeli occupation’. Unless you have experienced something similar, it’s impossible to fully understand what innocent Gazans have suffered and continue to live through but this book allows readers to gain at least some insight.
December 28, 2025
I found the book underwhelming, because it was merely a general overview of the Gaza situation which I felt I could have researched through Wikipedia.
It is titled ‘a historian in Gaza’, yet the author, who is the historian in question, provides minuscule anecdotes about his time in Gaza, shielding the reader from a deeper understanding of what life was like, at least from his perspective.
I felt as if this should have been a been a blog post, not a book.
It is titled ‘a historian in Gaza’, yet the author, who is the historian in question, provides minuscule anecdotes about his time in Gaza, shielding the reader from a deeper understanding of what life was like, at least from his perspective.
I felt as if this should have been a been a blog post, not a book.
January 7, 2026
Quite interesting and very brief
April 8, 2026
This book can be read in one or two sittings. I will post my review here once it is published at Responsible Statecraft.
Here it is:
As the war in Iran absorbs the world’s attention, with its images of dead school girls and flattened buildings, it may be easy to overlook Gaza. It has been a full five months since a ceasefire went into effect. It did not stop the bloodshed and intense suffering: Israeli forces have killed hundreds of Palestinians since October, and the enclave remains in dire need of food and medicine. Yet Gaza has disappeared from America’s front pages as the Trump administration’s Board of Peace, mostly bereft of Palestinian leadership, attempts to steer a peace plan to its second phase.
Moving on implies that one was once preoccupied with something. It is true that people all over the world intently watched Israel’s war of annihilation unfold on their smartphone screens. They were appalled by the indiscriminate violence that killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians following the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023. Campuses erupted in protest.
Their governments, however, had abandoned Gaza long before. As Israeli bombs and missiles killed and maimed Palestinians and leveled hospitals and refugee camps, Washington kept the weapons flowing to Tel Aviv while providing an Israeli veto at the U.N. Security Council. European and Arab governments protested, some more vehemently than others, but lacked either the will or the influence to stop what a growing consensus of historians, jurists, human rights groups, and international legal bodies considered genocide.
In “A Historian in Gaza,” eminent historian Jean-Pierre Filiu shows us the consequences of this international indifference, drawing on his monthlong visit to the shattered strip in early 2025. “Gazans know the world has abandoned them,” Filiu writes. “At first they believed that images of the slaughter would so horrify the international public that they would demand action to end it. The realization that this was not going to happen compounded the wounds of the injured with its own pain.”
The rest:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/the...
Here it is:
As the war in Iran absorbs the world’s attention, with its images of dead school girls and flattened buildings, it may be easy to overlook Gaza. It has been a full five months since a ceasefire went into effect. It did not stop the bloodshed and intense suffering: Israeli forces have killed hundreds of Palestinians since October, and the enclave remains in dire need of food and medicine. Yet Gaza has disappeared from America’s front pages as the Trump administration’s Board of Peace, mostly bereft of Palestinian leadership, attempts to steer a peace plan to its second phase.
Moving on implies that one was once preoccupied with something. It is true that people all over the world intently watched Israel’s war of annihilation unfold on their smartphone screens. They were appalled by the indiscriminate violence that killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians following the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023. Campuses erupted in protest.
Their governments, however, had abandoned Gaza long before. As Israeli bombs and missiles killed and maimed Palestinians and leveled hospitals and refugee camps, Washington kept the weapons flowing to Tel Aviv while providing an Israeli veto at the U.N. Security Council. European and Arab governments protested, some more vehemently than others, but lacked either the will or the influence to stop what a growing consensus of historians, jurists, human rights groups, and international legal bodies considered genocide.
In “A Historian in Gaza,” eminent historian Jean-Pierre Filiu shows us the consequences of this international indifference, drawing on his monthlong visit to the shattered strip in early 2025. “Gazans know the world has abandoned them,” Filiu writes. “At first they believed that images of the slaughter would so horrify the international public that they would demand action to end it. The realization that this was not going to happen compounded the wounds of the injured with its own pain.”
The rest:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/the...
May 21, 2026
That's the flag of Sudan on the cover, not Palestine. All other versions appear to be correct, just not this one.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews