🚛 A French Historian Got Into Gaza. There He Witnessed the IDF Helping to Loot Palestinian Aid Trucks

We already knew this was happening, but having a 3rd party see it and document it is very powerful.

Family,

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A Historian Sneaks Into Gaza

Because Israel has blocked nearly all independent observers and media from Gaza, we’ve had to fight for every piece of truth we can get.

Into that blackout walked Jean-Pierre Filiu, a French professor of Middle East studies at Sciences Po. He managed to enter Gaza in December, hosted by an international aid group in al-Mawasi, the so-called “humanitarian zone” on the coast where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians were packed into tents and rubble.

Filiu stayed for more than a month, leaving shortly after the second short-lived “truce” in January. He wrote a book about what he saw — A Historian in Gaza — first in French, now in English. The Guardian’s report on that book stopped me cold.

Here’s the heart of it:

Filiu says he saw “utterly convincing” evidence that Israel supported looters who attacked aid convoys in Gaza. Not just passively allowing it, but actively helping it happen — while famine was threatening whole parts of the strip.

If that sentence doesn’t land with you yet, keep reading.

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The Convoy That Was Supposed to Be Safe

From where Filiu was staying in al-Mawasi, he watched a particular convoy that aid officials hoped would finally get through without being torn apart.

• Sixty-six trucks loaded with flour and hygiene kits left the Kerem Shalom crossing.

• They drove west along the corridor that hugs the Egyptian border, then turned north up the coastal road.

• Because convoys had been repeatedly attacked by local gangs, militias, and desperate civilians, Hamas recruited powerful local families to help guard this route. Armed men from those families rode out to protect the trucks.

This is where the story should turn into a tiny bit of hope: hungry people getting food, UN agencies finally finding a route that isn’t looted, a fragile line of order in the middle of hell.

Instead, Filiu says, the convoy came under fire — not from the guards, but from above.

He writes that Israeli quadcopters — small, armed drones — were “supporting the looters in attacking the local security teams.”

The Israeli military, he says, killed two local notables as they sat in their car, armed and ready to protect the trucks. With the guards taken out, roughly 20 of the 66 trucks were robbed on the spot.

It tells you how desperate things were that the UN looked at losing a third of the food and still called it a partial success. Earlier convoys had been stripped almost completely.

Filiu’s conclusion is blunt:

The Israeli rationale was to discredit Hamas and the UN and to allow Israel’s “clients, the looters,” to either redistribute the aid to build their own networks or sell it for cash so they wouldn’t depend solely on Israeli money.

In other words, while Israelis went on TV and blamed Hamas for “stealing aid,” Filiu says he watched the Israeli military shoot the people trying to protect the trucks and clear the way for gangs.

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When Famine Becomes a Weapon

Under international law, there is a very simple line you are not supposed to cross.

You are not allowed to starve civilians as a method of warfare.

That means you cannot deliberately destroy, block, or steal “objects indispensable to survival” — things like food, water, and medicine — to break a people.

From the Geneva Conventions to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, this is clearly defined as a war crime.

Israel has tried to argue that it is doing the opposite: that it is the one allowing aid into Gaza, that Hamas is the one stealing it, that if people are starving it’s because of “looters” and “terrorists.”

This new testimony blows a hole right through that story.

According to The Guardian’s reporting on Filiu’s book:

• Israeli forces repeatedly attacked the Palestinian police and security forces who guarded convoys, collapsing what little law and order was left.

• A confidential UN memo at the time described Israel’s “passive, if not active benevolence” toward the gangs looting aid.

• When the World Food Programme tried to open a new route to avoid known looting spots, Filiu says Israel bombed the middle of that road, deliberately making it unusable.

Israel formally denies all this. An IDF spokesperson claims that in the specific incident Filiu describes, they targeted a car of “terrorists” who were trying to divert aid to Hamas storage. They say they hit the vehicle “to avoid damaging the aid.”

But you can see the pattern:

First you strangle the crossings, limiting how much food comes in at all.
Then you kill the local police and guards who escort the convoys.
Then you hit the alternative routes aid groups try to open.
Then, as chaos explodes, you go on television and say, “Look, Hamas and criminals are stealing the aid. We’re the ones trying to help.”

Starvation becomes not a tragic side-effect, but a tool.

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Netanyahu’s “Popular Forces” and the Politics of Looting

If all you had were rumors, you might think this is too conspiratorial. But even Benjamin Netanyahu has already admitted part of the story out loud.

He has openly acknowledged that Israel supported a militia called the “Popular Forces” inside Gaza — an anti-Hamas outfit that, by everyone’s account, included many of the same looters who were attacking convoys.

So on one side you have the Israeli army shooting or bombing the police and local notables trying to guard aid.

On the other side, you have prop-Israeli militias, full of looters, who are then able to step into that vacuum: controlling food, selling it, deciding who eats and who doesn’t.

And floating above all of it is the narrative beamed into Western living rooms:

Hamas steals aid.
Gazans are animals.
Israel is doing everything it can.

Jean-Pierre Filiu is saying: I stood in al-Mawasi, watched those trucks, heard the drones, and none of that story is true.

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Gaza as a “Post-Geneva” World

Filiu has been visiting Gaza for decades. He told The Guardian he was shocked by what he saw this time:

“Anything that stood before,” he said, “had been erased, annihilated.”

He reminded people that Gaza was probably the place on Earth where Hamas is most unpopular, because people there know what its rule has meant. They don’t have illusions about its brutality. If you were actually trying to defeat Hamas in a way that respected human beings, you would at least pretend to run a campaign to win hearts and minds.

Instead, Israel chose a different experiment.

Filiu calls Gaza today a “laboratory of a post-UN world, of a post-Geneva convention world, of a post-declaration of human rights world.”

And then he says something that should haunt all of us:

“This world is very scary because it’s not even rational. It’s just ferocious.”

I feel that line deep in my chest.

We are watching a state that is:

• bombing schools and hospitals,

• killing surrendered men on camera and promoting their commanders,

• starving families while enabling looters and then blaming the hungry.

And we’re watching the so-called international community largely accept it, shrug, and move on.

If Gaza is a “laboratory,” it’s because powerful people are testing how much law they can shred, how much cruelty they can normalize, how openly they can use famine as a weapon — and still keep their weapons, their trade, their diplomatic immunity.

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What We Do With This

Family, I know this is heavy. We’ve been living with this genocide for more than two years now. Stories like this don’t land on blank minds; they land on people who are already grieving, angry, exhausted.

But I also know this: nobody in power is going to hold Israel accountable for turning aid into a weapon if the rest of us look away.

Jean-Pierre Filiu did something risky and necessary: he went into Gaza when almost no one else was allowed to, he wrote down what he saw, and he put his name on it.

Our job is to not let that testimony sink without a trace.

We need to call this what it is: starvation as policy, not tragedy.
We need to stop repeating lines about “Hamas stealing aid” without understanding how Israel has helped create that chaos, fund those gangs, and then weaponize the images.
We need to say plainly that this is exactly what international law says you cannot do — and that every government still arming and funding Israel is complicit in that crime.

If my work helps you say those things more clearly, if it gives you language you can use with your own family, friends, coworkers, and community, I’m asking you to help me keep doing it. Please click here to become a member so we can keep this work free for the world, especially for readers in Gaza and across Palestine who can’t pay for it. And if you’re in a position to build a stronger foundation under everything we’re creating, please click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member.

Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

Don’t Stop Here

Don’t let this be just one more horrible story you read and then scroll past.

Keep digging. Here are 3 FREE stories with NO PAYWALL for you…

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Read them. Talk about them with your people. Forward this post to at least three people who still say “it’s complicated” when you try to tell them what’s really happening in Gaza.

Because if Gaza is the laboratory of a post-law world, our silence is the experiment’s fuel.