LONDON: A French academic has said he witnessed Israel enabling the looting of aid trucks in Gaza.
Jean-Pierre Filiu spent more than a month in the Palestinian enclave from December 2024, which formed the basis for his book “A Historian in Gaza,” which was published this month in English.
The professor of Middle East studies at France’s Sciences Po university was able to avoid detection by Israel despite a ban on international media entering Gaza.
He claims in the book to have witnessed attacks by the Israeli military on aid convoys and their security staff guarding them from looters.
His testimony backs UN claims that attacks on police in Gaza by Israel aided looters at a time when mass hunger threatened much of the enclave.
An internal UN memo described the approach as “passive if not active benevolence” toward looters.
In one incident Filiu described in the book, 66 trucks carrying aid into Gaza from the Kerem Shalom border crossing, which were being guarded by Hamas, came under attack by Israel.
“It was one night and I was … a few hundred metres away. And it was very clear that Israeli quadcopters were supporting the looters in attacking the local security (teams),” Filiu wrote, adding that the attack killed “two local notables as they sat in their car, armed and ready to protect the convoy.” In all, 20 trucks were then left unguarded and ransacked.
“The (Israeli) rationale (was) to discredit Hamas and the UN at that time … and to allow (Israel’s) clients, the looters, to either redistribute the aid to expand their own support networks or to make money out of reselling it in order to get some cash and so not depend exclusively on Israeli financial support,” Filiu said.
In another incident, he described an attack by Israel on a route opened for aid groups to avoid areas where looting was rife.
“The World Food Programme was trying to set up an alternative route to the coastal road and Israeli bombed the middle of the road … It was a deliberate attempt to put it out of action,” he told The Guardian, adding that “anything that stood before” in Gaza has been “erased, annihilated” by the war that began in October 2023.
Around 70,000 Palestinians are believed to have been killed, with much of the enclave’s infrastructure destroyed.
“Any successful counterinsurgency anywhere over history … has to balance the military operation with some kind of political campaign to win hearts and minds,” he said.
“(Israel) didn’t even pretend to do that in Gaza at any time, (but) Gaza is probably the place on Earth where Hamas is the most unpopular because in Gaza they know Hamas (and) don’t have any illusions about the reality of Islamist domination and the brutality of its rules.”
He added: “I’ve always been convinced that (the war in Gaza is) a universal tragedy. It’s not one more Middle Eastern conflict.
“It’s a laboratory of a post-UN world, of a post Geneva convention world, of a post-declaration of human rights world, and this world is very scary because it’s not even rational. It’s just ferocious.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted Israeli backing of the Popular Forces, an anti-Hamas group known to have looted aid.