Book: A Historian in Gaza
Author: Jean-Pierre Filiu
Published by: Context
Price: Rs 499
In A Historian in Gaza, Jean-Pierre Filiu does something both simple and radical: he insists on seeing for himself the situation in Gaza. A professor of Middle East Studies who has travelled to Gaza since 1980, Filiu joins a humanitarian mission and spends a month inside the enclave between December 2024 and January 2025. What emerges is neither a technical policy brief nor an abstract polemic but a work of witness — an attempt to recover the meaning of words in a landscape where language itself has been strained to breaking point.
The book opens with a stark refrain: nothing had prepared him for what he would see. Not his decades of scholarship, not his previous visits, not even his familiarity with war zones from Ukraine to Syria. This insistence is not rhetorical excess. It signals the book’s central claim: that Gaza, in this phase of the conflict, represents not simply another round of violence but a qualitative rupture. The Gaza he knew, he writes, has ceased to exist.
Filiu enters Gaza under the watchful choreography of “coordination” — the bureaucratic apparatus by which Israel regulates the movement of people and goods into and out of the Strip. He traces this regime back not merely to the post-2007 blockade but to 1967, situating contemporary restrictions within a longer architecture of occupation. Even humanitarian entry is subject to elaborate permissions, bottlenecks and inspections. The very act of crossing into Gaza becomes emblematic of a larger system in which life is cautiously administered and carefully orchestrated.
Filiu travels through Rafah, Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah and the coastal strip of Al-Mawasi, designated a “humanitarian zone”. The phrase itself becomes an object of scrutiny. In practice, this zone is a densely-packed expanse of tents, mud, plastic sheeting and improvised latrines. Filiu juxtaposes official maps and statistics with the textures of daily survival: infants dying in large numbers and families displaced again and again.
Hospitals occupy a central place in the narrative. Filiu documents the siege, evacuation and destruction of medical facilities such as Kamal Adwan and Al-Shifa. He locates these events within the framework of international humanitarian law, citing the Geneva Conventions’ protections for civilian hospitals. The question he repeatedly raises is not merely whether violations occurred, but what it means for a society when emergency wards and operation theatres are reduced to battlegrounds.
Yet this is not a book of statistics and data alone. Its moral force derives from individual stories. A child dead from the cold in a tent; a calligrapher killed in a strike; a hospital director arrested after refusing to abandon his patients. These vignettes are not ornamental: they are the method. Filiu insists that historical understanding must be anchored in lived experience, and macro-analysis without human faces risks becoming sterile.
Importantly, the book does not ignore the precipitating events of October 2023. Filiu records his immediate condemnation of the Hamas attacks and his call for the unconditional release of Israeli hostages. His argument, however, is that the Israeli response — particularly the scale of destruction and displacement — has produced consequences that extend far beyond military objectives. He suggests that the systematic devastation of Gaza’s built environment risks erasing the very social fabric in which political alternatives might take root.
Stylistically, A Historian in Gaza is measured but powerful. The chapters are alarmingly short, giving the book an almost staccato-like rhythm, which mirrors the fragmentation of the landscape it describes. Filiu avoids academic jargon, yet the analytical scaffolding is unmistakable. He weaves together history, law, demography, and field observation without allowing any one register to dominate. The result is a hybrid form: part reportage, part historical meditation.
The book also reflects on the politics of narrative itself. Israel’s ban on foreign journalists, the role of social media, the competing claims of propaganda — these are not peripheral concerns. Filiu is acutely aware that Gaza is not only a battlefield but a site of informational struggle. By embedding himself within a medical organisation, he seeks to bypass some of these constraints, though he remains transparent about the limits of any single vantage point.
Ultimately, A Historian in Gaza is a work about responsibility: the responsibility of scholars to leave their desks; of States to uphold humanitarian law; of readers to confront uncomfortable realities. It does not give us a blueprint for peace. Instead, it offers something more elemental — a record. In an era when numbers circulate faster than names and outrage risks
becoming routine, Filiu’s account restores weight to both. He reminds us that history is not only written after the fact. Sometimes, it is written in the ruins, while the dust is still settling.