Israel deliberately backed looters who attacked aid convoys in Gaza, prominent French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu has revealed. The looting is said to have been part of a calculated campaign to undermine both Palestinian authorities and international humanitarian agencies.
Filiu, professor of Middle East studies at Sciences Po in Paris, spent over a month in Gaza during the genocide at the end of 2023. In his new eyewitness account, ‘An Historian in Gaza’, Filiu says he personally witnessed Israeli military operations that directly facilitated the looting of desperately needed aid.
Writing about a specific incident in Al-Mawasi, a supposed ‘humanitarian zone’ densely packed with displaced Palestinians, Filiu recounts how, after weeks of aid convoys being raided, the UN attempted a new delivery route escorted by local armed guards, including powerful families enlisted by Hamas to ensure protection. However, the convoy came under attack.
‘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 writes. He describes how the Israeli military killed two locals who had been tasked with protecting the convoy, while 20 out of 66 trucks were looted.
Filiu argues that ‘Israel’s 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,’ he told The Guardian, which reported the claims.
The historian also accused Israel of deliberately bombing a new route opened by the World Food Programme to bypass looting hotspots. ‘The World Food Programme was trying to set up an alternative route to the coastal road and Israel bombed the middle of the road … It was a deliberate attempt to put it out of action,’ he said.
Filiu’s claims are echoed by an internal UN memo at the time which described Israel’s ‘active benevolence’ towards criminal gangs that had seized aid convoys.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously admitted that Israel had assisted the Popular Forces, an anti-Hamas militia which has included known looters among its ranks. This has fed longstanding allegations that Israel has enabled criminal groups in Gaza to destabilise Hamas rule while projecting plausible deniability.
Aid officials have long reported that Israeli strikes on police stations and security escorts in Gaza have created a vacuum of law and order, leaving humanitarian operations vulnerable to armed robbery and militia control.
Filiu, who has visited Gaza many times over several decades, said the destruction he witnessed was unprecedented. ‘Anything that stood before has been erased, annihilated,’ he said. In his view, Israel’s war on Gaza was not only militarily devastating but constituted the collapse of all normative restraints. ‘It’s a laboratory of a post-Geneva Convention world, of a post-human rights world, and this world is very scary because it’s not even rational,’ he warned.