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.” Filiu teaches Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris. Before becoming a scholar about 20 years ago, he served as a diplomat for the French government, holding several high-level positions, including postings in Tunisia, Jordan, and Syria. He has written extensively about jihadism, authoritarianism, and the centrality of Gaza to any enduring peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
If the process of forgetting has already begun, Filiu's experience, recorded in a compact 197 pages, is meant to refocus our minds on what some might prefer to erase from memory. Hospitals under siege, patients operated on without anesthetics, infants dying of hypothermia, children mutilated by bombs and missiles, women too exhausted and malnourished to breastfeed, journalists mowed down for the crime of reporting, and entire families crushed under the weight of their collapsing apartment blocks. “Nothing had prepared me for what I saw and experienced in Gaza,” Filiu writes. “Nothing at all.”
His observations, however, were limited by geography. Filiu only occasionally traveled outside the “humanitarian zone” into which half of Gaza’s population was crammed in no more than one-fifth of the strip’s total area. What he did not see himself, he learned from speaking to people who fled to the zone’s relative safety. (It was not entirely spared from deadly air strikes.) Filiu augments his narrative by citing news reports of noteworthy incidents that happened during his 32-day-long stay.
These limits do not weaken “A Historian in Gaza,” because everyone who appears in its pages, including the author, struggles to find the words to describe the enormity of the horrors surrounding them. Filiu wisely avoids polemics. Rather, he takes us by the hand and leads us into a war zone so we might see it through Gazans’ eyes: “The seafront is now covered with a mass of tightly packed tents, facing the wind and ocean spray, with only narrow beaten earth paths between them. The [drone] strike killed eight people, including two children. A dozen tents caught fire. Panicked survivors tried to put out the fire with the little water they had at their disposal. Armloads of sand were thrown at the spreading flames.” One of Filiu’s strengths is drawing throughlines. For instance, Israeli control of everything that crosses into Gaza, right down to what is on people’s plates, did not begin after Oct. 7, 2023. The “Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories” goes back to the Six-Day War of 1967, after which Israel occupied Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank.
With the occupation came the border crossings through which food and medicine may be restricted or cut off entirely — “instruments of pressure, even asphyxiation,” says Filiu, connected to “the refusal to allow the Palestinian Authority to establish an authentic state of Palestine.” Thus, after the bloodiest single day in Israel’s history, the Israel Defense Forces were already positioned to cause famine in Gaza. On Feb. 28, Israeli authorities closed all crossings again, amid the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. Two have since partially reopened.
Poverty is another throughline. Palestinians are now engulfed in an economic catastrophe, but authentic development was thwarted decades ago. Multiple plans to open Gaza to the world economy were undercut by a combination of Israeli intransigence and Hamas oppression, what Palestinians call the “nightmare within the nightmare,” notes Filiu. Therefore, right up until Oct. 7, the severe lack of opportunities had turned Gaza into a source of low-cost labor inside Israel, where work permits allowed Palestinians to earn better wages. This arrangement was part of the misguided, frequently bloody security balance known as “mowing the grass.” It wound up empowering Hamas before it exploded in Benjamin Netanyahu’s face. Civilians on both sides of the security fence would suffer horrendous consequences.
By the time Filiu departed, Israeli forces had killed an estimated one thousand children per month in Gaza, roughly 15,000 in all. They included the three-day-old twins of Mohammed Abu al-Qumsan. Minutes after he registered their births, they were killed in the bombing of Deir al-Balah. Some 35,000 children had been wounded. Thirty-one of the enclave’s 36 hospitals were bombed. Eleven were placed under siege. “More healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza since October 2023 than in all conflicts globally in 2021 and 2022 combined,” Filiu writes. We must not allow ourselves to become numb to such figures. However, he concedes “statistics do not necessarily provide a more reliable indication of the ongoing slaughter, as the figures are so disturbing they upset even the people who produce them.” “A Historian in Gaza” is a testament to human suffering but also resilience and courage. It will form a small part of the historical record, and that alone is worth something. Wherever there are atrocities, the perpetrators will deny them. Where there was orchestrated starvation in Gaza, pro-Israel media outlets denied it. The truth matters, especially as Israel continues to bar foreign journalists from entering Gaza. Prosecutors at the Hague may never get a chance to argue their case, but no case is possible without accurate accounts of Israel’s conduct.
Yet one cannot escape the depressing feeling that the facts inside Filiu’s book, which have been reported elsewhere and are available to anyone with an ounce of curiosity, won’t make a difference. Instead, the destruction of norms protecting civilians in war is accelerating. The rules of the “rules-based order” are buried in the rubble along with the mangled corpses of thousands of Palestinian children. This, too, is a choice. Forgetting is not an accident. Gazans were acutely aware they might be quickly forgotten: shortly before he was killed by Israeli artillery fire on Al-Awda Hospital, Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujeila wrote on a whiteboard, “Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could. Remember us.”
The historian Sven Lindquist once wrote about the problem of genocide that “It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” We may thank Jean-Pierre Filiu for raising our knowledge.