A Historian in Gaza: Jean-Pierre Filiu's unflinching 33-day account inside Israel's genocide

"Nothing had prepared me for what I saw and experienced in Gaza. Nothing at all. Nothing." The opening words of this gem of an account from Jean-Pierre Filiu's visit to Gaza during Israel's genocide are no exaggeration, even from a man all too painfully accustomed to seeing the aftermath of war.

Professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po and a former diplomat, Filiu has all the credentials to be a formidable diarist for the 32 days he spent in Gaza a year ago on a trip with Doctors Without Borders.

Israel has banned all non-Gaza journalists, academics, and human rights monitors from entering Gaza for over two years. But the story of the occupier's atrocities is recorded and told, often thanks to the extraordinary doctors and humanitarian workers giving us eyewitness accounts.

Palestinian journalists from Gaza have told this horrific story as well, often losing their lives to Israeli fire in the process. Filiu pays a fulsome tribute to them in his book, A Historian in Gaza.

As an academic, historian and writer, Filiu presents a rounded tale, weaving all his experience and scholarship into his daily exploration of the horrors in the enclave. 

His efforts address a stunning lacuna in all the coverage of Gaza over the last two years: any sense of historical knowledge. To read many of the self-appointed critics who have never even got close to Gaza is to read a history that started on October 7. Gaza, in the public imagination, is just an overcrowded Palestinian hellhole of no historical import whatsoever.

However, in A Historian in Gaza, Filiu writes detailed accounts of Gaza's history, showing how it has been at the epicentre of many significant historical events, wars, and imperial clashes.

Few outsiders can claim to know the history of the tortured land and people he was bearing witness to. He rightly highlights how much more devastating this Nakba is than the 1948 one — around one percent of the Palestinian population was killed in the original one, but around 2.3% of Gazans had been killed since October 2023 until January 2025.

Every chapter follows a key theme about life and death in Gaza.

He kicks off with the Kafkaesque process of travelling in a humanitarian convoy from Jordan. Israel has deliberately imposed such labyrinthine obstacles and bureaucratic hurdles. He can only take medication for personal use and no more than three kilos of food.

A chapter on hospitals is everything one might imagine and worse. He highlights how Israel had hit every hospital in Rafah in its May 2024 offensive, save the Emirati field hospital in Rafah — targeting that would have endangered its treasured Abraham Accords.

Water is often undercovered as an issue, but Filiu's chapter addresses shortages, dangers, and even floods. Rains in December 2024 had become another "enemy to be neutralised in the daily battle for survival." This struggle has been even worse in the winter of 2025.

It is a humanising picture the author paints. Palestinians are real-life characters presented in a rounded, fulsome fashion. He marvels at their ingenuity, the way cooking gas canisters are fitted onto three-wheeled vehicles.

"A Palestinian's only friend is his donkey", is a phrase he often hears. Street sellers set up charging points for phones using solar panels.

Filiu never pretends to have visited every area of Gaza. He is clear that he was largely restricted to the misnamed 'safe zone' of al-Mawasi and could not go to Gaza City, for example. He is fully aware of how privileged he is, able to have food and water, but above all, to leave when necessary.

Yet this readable and accessible account brings Gaza to life as it dies. A month in the genocide is incredibly brave and tough, but his account is a stunning testament to the fortitude of those who have endured this for over two years.

The abject betrayal of the international community is perhaps best summed up by Filiu's observation that the remaining emaciated donkeys he had seen had helped Palestinians far more than international law ever had.

Chris Doyle is the director of CAABU (Council for Arab-British Understanding). He is a regular opinion writer and commentator on the Middle East and has organised and accompanied numerous British parliamentary delegations to the region.

Follow him on X: @Doylech