Historian’s Eyewitness Account Alleges Israeli Military Actively Backed Aid Convoy Looters in Gaza

A prominent French historian and professor, who spent over a month in the Gaza Strip during the recent conflict, has published a first-hand account containing what he describes as “utterly convincing” evidence that the Israeli military actively supported looters who attacked humanitarian aid convoys. These allegations add weight to long-standing claims from international aid agencies that Israel’s actions systematically obstructed the delivery of lifesaving supplies to a starving population.

Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies at Paris’s prestigious Sciences Po university, entered Gaza in December, evading strict Israeli restrictions that have largely blocked international media and independent observers from the territory. Hosted by a humanitarian organization in the southern area of al-Mawasi—a designated “humanitarian zone” overwhelmed with displaced civilians—Filiu documented his experiences in the book, A Historian in Gaza. His account provides a rare, on-the-ground perspective from a scholar with decades of experience in the region.

A Pattern of Attacks on Security and Aid

At the heart of Filiu’s allegations is a detailed description of Israeli military attacks on the very Palestinian security personnel attempting to protect aid convoys from looting. With law and order in Gaza having collapsed under the Israeli offensive, and with Israeli forces systematically targeting police officers for their affiliation with Hamas, securing aid deliveries became a monumental challenge.

Filiu recounts a specific incident near al-Mawasi, intended by the UN as a test of a new, safer route for its convoys. After weeks of near-total looting by a mix of criminal gangs, militias, and desperate civilians, a 66-truck convoy carrying flour and hygiene kits set out. To ensure its security, Hamas enlisted powerful local families to provide armed guards along the route.

“It was one night and I was … a few hundred metres away,” Filiu writes. “And it was very clear that Israeli quadcopters were supporting the looters in attacking the local security [teams].” The historian states that an Israeli drone strike killed “two local notables as they sat in their car, armed and ready to protect the convoy.” In the ensuing chaos, twenty trucks were looted—a loss the UN paradoxically considered an improvement, as it was less than the near-total thefts of previous convoys.

A Deliberate Strategy of Destabilization

According to Filiu, this was not an isolated event but part of a calculated Israeli strategy. “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,” he argued. This approach, he suggests, created a class of armed groups dependent on Israeli tolerance, thereby fracturing local power structures and preventing Hamas from consolidating control or gaining credit for facilitating aid.

These claims are supported by an internal United Nations memo from the period, which described Israel’s “passive, if not active benevolence” towards the looting gangs. Filiu further alleges that when international agencies attempted to establish an alternative route to bypass the looters, the Israeli military deliberately sabotaged the effort. “The World Food Programme was trying to set up an alternative route… and Israel bombed the middle of the road … It was a deliberate attempt to put it out of action,” he told the Guardian.

Israeli Denials and Counter-Accusations

The Israeli military has vehemently denied these charges. In response to the specific incident described by Filiu, a military spokesperson stated that an Israeli Air Force aircraft “conducted a precise strike on a vehicle with armed terrorists inside who were planning to divert humanitarian aid into Hamas storage units.” The spokesperson emphasized that the strike was conducted to “ensure a hit on the terrorists while avoiding damaging the aid,” and reiterated the IDF’s commitment to facilitating humanitarian aid in accordance with international law.

Israel has consistently maintained that Hamas systematically steals aid for its own forces and to fund its operations, a charge Hamas denies. While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied deliberately obstructing aid, he did admit to providing support for the “Popular Forces,” an anti-Hamas militia that aid officials say included many known looters.

A “Universal Tragedy” and a Broken Future

Beyond the immediate allegations, Filiu’s account offers a bleak assessment of the conflict’s broader implications. Having visited Gaza for decades, he expressed shock at the scale of destruction, finding that “anything that stood before” had been “erased, annihilated.”

He also critiqued the Israeli strategy as a catastrophic failure of counterinsurgency principles. “Any successful counterinsurgency anywhere over history … has to balance the military operation with some kind of political campaign to win hearts and minds,” Filiu said. “[Israel] didn’t even pretend to do that in Gaza at any time.”

Ultimately, Filiu frames the war in Gaza as a watershed moment with global consequences. “I’ve always been convinced that it’s a universal tragedy. It’s not one more Middle Eastern conflict,” he concluded. “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.”

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