translated by Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous
C,Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
ISBN 9781805265252
RRP £16.99
Review by Mike Scott-Baumann
Jean-Pierre Filiu is a French historian and author of Gaza: A History. He had visited Gaza many times before 7 Oct 2023 yet he writes: “Nothing had prepared me for what I saw and experienced in Gaza between 19 Dec 2024 and 21 Jan 2025.”
So total was the destruction and the deprivation he witnessed during that month that he found Gazans fantasising about the pre-October 2023 Gaza – the Gaza under Israeli siege, the Gaza that was the “biggest outdoor prison in the world” – as “a lost paradise”, yearning for those days as the “good old days” (literally, in Arabic, the “sweet days”).
Like everyone and everything that enters Gaza, his entry was “coordinated” by the Israeli forces of COGAT (the “Co-ordination of Government Activities in the Territories”), the head of which had stated that nothing should detract from the “hell” that all Gazans deserved.
Methodically and soberly, Filiu records all he saw and heard during the month. He visits several hospitals, in one of which five staff were killed and medical supplies from the World Health Organisation (WHO) were destroyed. At another, Israeli forces killed four medics and two pregnant women who were trying to reach the hospital entrance. The electricity was cut off and four died in the intensive care unit. At a third, two doctors were killed: one wrote before dying on the whiteboard “Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could. Remember us.”
In writing this book, Filiu is fulfilling the doctor’s plea.
Many of the testimonies he hears attest to the “discreet devotion, proven courage and even pure heroism” of hospital staff, some of whom stayed at work even after they heard the evacuation order on the residential block where their families lived. He reminds us that more healthcare workers were killed in Gaza than in all conflicts globally in 2021 and 2022 combined. There are occasional statistics like this but the book is mostly a record of what the author witnessed and of what he gleaned from talking to Gazans.
Journalists are another group of people who are “feted everywhere as the real heroes of this hell”. While foreign media have been banned from Gaza, Palestinian journalists have risked, and lost, lives to ensure that ”censorship does not succeed.” Wearing the bulletproof vest can make journalists a target for Israeli snipers and many of them have left behind orphaned children.
Filiu witnesses many examples of the ingenuity shown in face of the endless ordeal: unusable solar panels recycled into water purifiers; an empty corned beef tin transformed into a stove; sewing machines turned by bicycle wheels.
He records instances of Israeli drones attacking the security escorts of United Nations aid convoys and looters taking advantage of the resulting chaos which is then blamed by the Israelis on Hamas, the incompetence of the UN and even of the latter’s complicity with Hamas.
The chaos and desperation is exploited by the actions of criminal gangs opposed to Hamas. One of these is led by Yasser Abu Shabab, previously imprisoned for smuggling, and is sponsored by the Israelis. They carry brand new weapons, a clue to their collaboration with the IDF. Over many years of visiting Gaza, Filiu writes, “I have never heard so many stories of looting in such abundant and sordid detail …… it speaks volumes about the collapse of public order in Gaza.”
Military bulldozers have demolished the solar farms powering four of Gaza’s six wastewater treatment plants. Meanwhile, a single “suspect” item (desalination equipment, flexible tanks, water quality testing kits) found in an aid truck entering Gaza can result in the whole truckload being turned away. While few have access to drinking water, the author writes of the rain that used to be greeted with joy “as it brought life to the now vanished fields and orchards.” Now, in mid-winter, it floods the tents and brings hypothermia and death, especially among children.
While the focus is very much on what he sees on the ground, he also records the opinions of Gazans. Unlike the books by Achcar and Shlaim (on the ‘Catastrophe’ and ‘Genocide’ respectively), Filiu conveys the view, common among Gazans he meets, that Hamas domination under Israeli blockade and onslaught is the “nightmare within a nightmare”: he tells of stories and images of knee-cappings to punish looters or “those whom they [Hamas] identify as such”. In the hospitals, the numbers of those injured in Israeli airstrikes was “now briefly matched by those resulting from inter-Palestinian violence.”
Filiu writes of the Gazans who will go back to the homes that have been destroyed and put up their tents in the ruins “rather than vegetate endlessly in the destitution” of the so-called “humanitarian zone”. They believe “the world has abandoned them”– but Filiu’s witness reminds us that their plight and the world’s responsibility must not be forgotten
Mike Scott-Baumann is a Trustee of the BPP and chair of its Executive Committee