Over the past thirty-five years, Mahmoud Assaf has collected over thirty thousand books in his Gaza City home. Despite being displaced five times (from Gaza City to Khan Yunis to Rafah, and now to a tent in Deir al-Balah), the renowned Palestinian author manages to keep tabs on his collection, entrusted to the watchful care of neighbors.

With Assaf’s home still relatively untouched, in a city reduced to rubble, his library caught the eye of a local baker, who called its owner up with a chilling proposal. He proposed that Assaf sell the books — not so that people can read them, but to burn them. Fuel is in short supply, the baker said, and Assaf could help “feed his people.” But Assaf refused. “Turning knowledge into ashes for survival,” he said, “feels like dying.”

Assaf’s story is not just a parable of dignity amid destruction, it’s a window into what remains of a society under siege. It is one of many such stories chronicled in Jean-Pierre Filiu’s searing new eyewitness account, published in late May: Un Historien à Gaza (“A Historian in Gaza,” to be published in English in January 2026).

Filiu is not your average war reporter. In what he calls “normal times,” he is a historian, a professor of Middle East studies at Sciences Po Paris and a former diplomat who has advised both the French government and the United Nations. He’s taught at Columbia and Georgetown, but also under Russian bombs in Kyiv, and is never pictured without his khaki “Fight like Ukrainians” hoodie. Fluent in Arabic, Filiu pens a weekly column analyzing the Middle East and the Arab world for French daily Le Monde. Thirteen years ago, he wrote what remains, to this day, the only comprehensive modern history of the territory. Gaza: A History (translated into English in 2014) is the culmination of Filiu’s numerous trips there since 1980.

But a historian needs archives to work, and Filiu’s were burning before his eyes after October 7, 2023. This is why he decided to go back to Gaza: to weave together local testimonies and his own historical expertise into an account of what the war is doing to a territory and a people that he’s come to know so intimately over almost half a century.

So, on December 19, 2024, Filiu crossed the border into Gaza. For the first time in his life, he did so clandestinely. He was the first researcher to enter the strip since foreign journalists (except those willing to come in an Israeli tank) were barred from journeying there after the October 7 attacks. “What would we understand of the war in Ukraine,” asks the historian, “if the only ones reporting on it were journalists based in and accredited by Moscow?”

Filiu himself only managed to get into Gaza embedded within an NGO convoy. Alongside Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), to whom Filiu is donating all the book’s proceeds, on the night of his sixty-third birthday, he entered Gaza on foot, guided by the dull glow of jeep headlights down a cracked stretch of asphalt near the Kerem Shalom crossing.

The first chapter of his book is titled “Nothing.”

“Nothing,” the first sentence reads, “prepared me for what I saw and lived through in Gaza.” Despite having been in a number of war zones in the past, from Ukraine to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, and having walked the ruins of Aleppo, Syria, Filiu writes: “I have never, never, experienced anything like this.”

“Now,” he adds, “I understand why Israel is denying the international press access to such a distressing scene.”

Filiu’s background gives him a singular authority. He isn’t parachuting into Gaza with a camera crew and a protective vest. He is too seasoned to lean on spectacle and rejects the “lunar landscape” cliché so often used by conflict reporters, writing instead with a dry, almost documentary clarity. Filiu knows the geography, the families, the history, the before. His new book is the record of his journey into the after, and a forensic reconstruction of the deliberate unmaking of a people. “The territory I had known no longer exists,” Filiu writes. “What remains is beyond words.”

Nonetheless, the rest of the book is his attempt to put words on the unspeakable. Because, as Filiu writes, “the historian knows by experience how opinion gradually accommodates conflicts that become established over time.”

What unfolds over the next thirty-two days is a litany of survival amid ruin: barefoot children scavenging in garbage pits but still feeding stray cats (“We know what hunger feels like”), hospitals using the same abdominal gauze for multiple patients, bike wheels used to power sewing machines.

At a time when Gaza is often reduced to a front line or a victim tally, Filiu reminds us that it is above all a society under siege. In A Historian in Gaza, he gives the rubble names and stories: Salama and Fangi, two calligraphers buried in the collapse of their home; Sila, a three-week-old baby girl who froze to death on Christmas Eve; Roshdi Sarraj, a local reporter whose house was bombed and who died while protecting his wife and child’s bodies with his own (the twenty-third journalist killed since October 7); Mahmoud Abou Nujaila, a doctor at Al-Awda Hospital who, before he was killed in said hospital, wrote a note on the surgery board: “We did what we could. Remember us.”

Though Filiu’s is a unique outsider report within the territory, his book is also a much-needed history lesson. The circumstantial reporter remains a historian at heart and anecdotes about daily life in Gaza often veer back in time.

Take, for instance, his chapter titled “The Water.” Filiu begins by describing children dragging jerry cans half their size to the distribution point. This battle for water, Filiu writes, “would almost make us forget that Gaza was for millennia an oasis renowned for the richness of its vegetation and the mildness of its climate.”

He then goes on to describe the plentiful Wadi Gaza, or Gaza Valley, which was long at the heart of historic Palestine’s prosperity. That was until Gaza’s hydraulic resources fell under Israeli control after it was occupied in 1967, and the rich oasis transformed into a strip of territory where Palestinian refugees found themselves confined. Because the historian always brings us back to the present, the chapter closes with the image of a young girl greedily sucking on a piece of pipe protruding from a desalination plant.

Filiu also documents how Gaza’s social fabric is disintegrating under siege. In the past, he explains, Gazan solidarity was famously high, spreading out to extended families. Now, even those who want to share food can’t do it beyond the immediate family circle. Solidarity is shrinking into survival.

Filiu devotes a whole chapter to gangs (“The Vultures”). He documents their history and shows the multiple ways in which they are “protected by Israeli benevolence.” Such are the cases of the Abu Shabab gang, reportedly armed by Israel itself, or the gangs aided by Israel Defense Forces drones in pillaging an aid convoy.

Violence is escalating in the crowded conditions of refugee camps. Sexual violence in particular has gotten so prevalent that, Filiu writes, the Ministry of Health was forced to allow abortion up to the hundred twentieth day of pregnancy, and that families give in to the early marriage of their daughters in an attempt to give them a form of protection.

Throughout, Filiu gives himself — and his readers — a break in the horror with either historical segues or what he calls “fragments of life.” It is in these, he says, that resistance survives — not the armed kind, but the refusal to succumb to dehumanization. There are the teachers desperately trying to keep pupils out of the rubble and in their makeshift classrooms (in September 2023, Filiu reminds us, literacy levels in Palestine were close to 98 percent). Clowns making their way through clinics and field hospitals, trying — desperately, absurdly — to coax a smile from the sick and the wounded. A book lover watching over his library from afar.

Though Filiu never uses the word “genocide,” he describes what he’s seen in Gaza as “ethnic cleansing.” “The expression,” writes the historian, “does not seem excessive to describe the methodical expulsion of the population, the equally methodical destruction of buildings (87% of homes), and the targeting of the last living spaces, namely hospitals (35 out of 36).”

Filiu writes at length about what he calls an “inhumanitarian war” — not just for the destruction it inflicts but for the legal order it is hollowing out. “Gaza,” he argues, “is a laboratory for a world emptied of international norms” — the laws and conventions meant to protect hospitals, journalists, or civilians, and that are treated here as merely optional or inconveniences to be bypassed.

Filiu refuses to sanitize blame. While unsparing in his condemnation of the Israeli army (which he refers to as “the invaders”), he is equally clear-eyed about Hamas’s crimes on October 7 and its violent chokehold on the civilian population within the strip. He also points to the bystanders: the United States and its “practically unconditional support for Israel’s war against Gaza”; the Arab states, once hailed as brothers; and the international press, restricted to what can be gleaned from Tel Aviv or Twitter, which has grown used to reporting on Gaza at arm’s length.

In his chapter on the local press, titled “The Witnesses,” Filiu introduces an image he will return to again and again: Mohammed Salem’s picture of a Palestinian woman cradling the body of her five-year-old niece in a southern Gaza hospital after an Israeli bombing on October 17, 2023. The picture, which quickly became known as The Piety of Gaza, won the prestigious 2024 World Press Photo of the Year award.

Ever the historian, Filiu takes us back to 1972 and Nick Ut’s The Terror of War — a Vietnam War picture colloquially known as “Napalm Girl.” This picture, Filiu reminds us, marked a turning point in American public perception of the war, accelerating the conclusion, the following year, of a historic peace agreement. Half a century later, though The Piety of Gaza was celebrated by photojournalists across the world, Filiu argues that such a shocking image did not provoke a debate commensurate with its intensity.

“It is,” he laments, “as if the veto against Western media in Gaza prevents the ongoing tragedy from acquiring its full universal value.”

And yet, Filiu insists, it matters. In a war where so much is meant to be erased — not just the buildings but the people who built them — The Piety of Gaza does what the historian must do: it insists on the human.