Jean-Pierre Filiu did not return from Gaza with platitudes, although he had traveled to the Strip many times over the years.
After spending a month in the besieged enclave during one of the most brutal stretches of Israel’s ongoing assault—between December 19, 2024, and January 21, 2025—the French historian brought back a clear-eyed account that indicts not only the architects of destruction, but the passivity and self-deception of a global community content to watch from a safe distance.
“The most shocking thing,” said Filiu, “is the gap between the ordeal in Gaza and how the outside world perceives it.” And therein lies the obscenity.
While television anchors peddled headlines about ceasefires and “precision strikes,” Filiu was ducking from bombs that fell in neighborhoods that no longer exist.
In the days leading up to the January 19 truce—celebrated abroad as a diplomatic breakthrough—Israel intensified its bombing campaign, pounding Gaza so relentlessly that even seasoned war correspondents were stunned. This wasn’t a ceasefire; it was a crescendo of violence wrapped in a lie.
The ruins of Gaza are not metaphors—they are schools, hospitals, apartment blocks, mosques, and clinics. They are now open graves.
Filiu, no stranger to the region, described a collapse so total that even family structures—once the last line of defense in a battered society—have disintegrated.
Wounded children lie in bombed-out hospitals, unclaimed, because there are no surviving relatives left to find them. Bands of orphans, too injured or too traumatized to speak, now scavenge in trash heaps for scraps of nylon and wood to sell as fuel.
No nation that permits this can pretend to stand for civilization.
Inside the hellscape that Gaza has become, words have lost meaning. “Humanitarian” now accompanies acts of state-sanctioned cruelty. “Surgical strikes” target entire neighborhoods. “Defense” is used to justify indiscriminate annihilation.
This Orwellian inversion of language is not a quirk of wartime rhetoric—it is part of the war effort itself, a tool for numbing conscience.
The Israeli government, backed by its allies and apologists, has tried to silence accusations of genocide by branding them as antisemitic.
But history does not bend to spin doctors.
Two Israeli Holocaust historians dared to say what others only whisper: what is happening in Gaza may not be Treblinka, but it is from “the same family”—a crime against a people, carried out with full knowledge, relentless violence, and unrepentant resolve.
When you bomb hospitals, starve children, level entire cities, and cut off water and electricity for months—when your stated goal is to make a place “unlivable”—you are not waging war. You are committing a crime.
Jean-Pierre Filiu saw it firsthand.
Hospitals targeted and sometimes occupied by Israeli forces. Over 1,000 healthcare workers killed. First responders turned into corpses. Medicine, painkillers, food—all scarce. Hope, scarcer still.
Amid the rubble, people line up to bury their dead with dignity. They find a way to teach, to repair currency, to love. These are the miracles of the damned.
But miracles are no substitute for justice.
Contrary to Israeli propaganda—which now functions as a kind of psychosis—the humanitarian aid entering Gaza is not systematically diverted by Hamas.
Filiu saw it with his own eyes: gangs of armed looters attacking aid convoys, not in the name of resistance, but with the quiet complicity or outright support of Israeli forces who know little about the land they bomb.
For twenty years, no Israeli—soldier or civilian—has entered Gaza except inside a tank. They do not see Palestinians as neighbors, or even as enemies. They see them as ghosts.
And ghosts are easier to bury.
But Gaza is not yet dead.
Despite living in what Filiu calls “a state of total, widespread distress,” some institutions still operate. Teachers still teach. Workers, if they are lucky, still receive electronic wages. The shekel is still in circulation, taped together by currency “repairers.”
It is a surreal parody of normal life, a theater of the absurd performed on a stage of ash.
And still, even now, Gaza resists not only with defiance, but with dignity. Opposition to Hamas, long simmering, still finds expression—even under bombs.
The people of Gaza, who have been betrayed by their leaders, bombarded by their occupiers, and abandoned by the so-called international community, somehow find the courage to protest. And for that, they are shot in the kneecaps.
This war, now in its second year, has exposed a grotesque failure of the international order. It is not a failure of intelligence, but of integrity.
It is a world where powerful democracies issue statements about “human shields” while ignoring the 14,000 children already killed. Where ceasefires are announced while bombs continue to fall. Where the International Criminal Court deliberates, while the buildings it might one day investigate are being reduced to dust.
The blockade of Gaza, now in its 18th year, has done nothing but turn Gaza into a pressure cooker of despair. It did not stop Hamas. It did not bring peace. It did not prevent October 7, the bloodiest day in Israel’s modern history. It only ensured that when retaliation came, it would be total—and, perhaps, permanent.
But Filiu still believes that peace is possible. Not out of naïveté, but because he has seen something no drone or diplomat can perceive: the endurance of human dignity, even amid the most monstrous cruelty.
If the world does not act—if it chooses comfort over confrontation, alliances over accountability—then it will not be enough to say, “We did not know.” We did know. We were told.
A historian has returned from Gaza with the evidence and now history will judge what humanity does with it.