Convincing evidence Israel backed aid convoy looters in Gaza, historian says

Original article by Jason Burke

A historian who spent more than a month in Gaza at the turn of the year says he saw “utterly convincing” evidence that Israel supported looters who attacked aid convoys during the conflict.

Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies at France’s prestigious Sciences Po university, entered Gaza in December where he was hosted by an international humanitarian organisation in the southern coastal zone of al-Mawasi.

Israel has blocked international media and other independent observers from Gaza but Filiu was able to evade strict Israeli vetting. He eventually left the territory shortly after the second short-lived truce during the war came into effect in January. His eyewitness account, A Historian in Gaza, was published in French in May and in English this month.

In the book, Filiu describes Israeli military attacks on security personnel protecting aid convoys. These permitted looters to seize huge quantities of food and other supplies destined for desperately needy Palestinians, he writes. Famine threatened parts of Gaza at the time, according to international humanitarian agencies.

UN agencies at the time told the Guardian that law and order had deteriorated across Gaza since Israel began targeting police officers, who guarded aid convoys. Israel considered police in Gaza, which has been run by Hamas since 2007, an integral part of the militant Islamist organisation.

In his book, Filiu describes an incident that, he says, took place very close to where staying in al-Mawasi, a supposed “humanitarian zone” packed with hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their often destroyed homes elsewhere, when, after continuous attacks on its convoys over weeks by local criminals, militias and desperate ordinary people, the UN decided to test a new itinerary that aid officials hoped would prevent looting.

Sixty-six trucks carrying flour and hygiene kits headed west from the Israeli checkpoint at Kerem Shalom along the corridor bordering Egypt, and then north on the main coastal road, Filiu says. Hamas was determined to handle security for the convoy and recruited powerful local families along its route to provide armed guards. However, the convoy quickly came under fire.

“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.

The Israeli military killed “two local notables as they sat in their car, armed and ready to protect the convoy”, Filiu says, and twenty trucks were robbed, though the UN considered the loss of one-third of the convoy a relative improvement on the looting of nearly all the previous loads, according to Filiu.

“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.

Israeli officials denied the charge. A military spokesperson said that in incident described by Filiu, 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 and violently [take] over an aid truck in the area of Dier al-Balah.”

“The strike was conducted to ensure a hit on the terrorists while avoiding damaging the aid. The IDF continues to operate against the Hamas terrorist organisation and is doing everything possible to mitigate harm to uninvolved civilians. The IDF … will also continue to act in accordance with international law to enable and facilitate the transfer of humanitarian aid to the residents of the Gaza Strip,” the spokesperson said.

Filiu’s accusations echo those made by some aid officials at the time. An internal United Nations memo described Israel’s “passive, if not active benevolence” towards some gangs responsible for looting in Gaza.

Filiu also accused Israeli forces of attacking a new route recently opened by international aid organisations to allow them to avoid looting blackspots.

“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,” the historian told the Guardian.

Israel, which imposed tight restrictions or even a total blockade on aid entering Gaza during the war, rejected allegations that it deliberately obstructed aid or supported looters. However, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu did admit that Israel had assisted the Popular Forces, an anti-Hamas militiathat included many looters amongst its recruits.

Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of systematically stealing aid in order to supply its own forces or to raise funds for political or military operations. Hamas denied the charges.

Filiu, who has been visiting Gaza for many decades, said he had been shocked to find that “anything that stood before” in the territory had been “erased, annihilated” in the war, which was triggered by a Hamas raid into Israel in October 2023. About 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in that attack and 250 taken hostage. Israel’s ensuing offensive killed nearly 70,000, mostly civilians, and reduced much of the territory to rubble.

“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, [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.”

The historian said the conflict in Gaza could have enormous consequences. “I’ve always been convinced that it’s 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,” Filiu said. “It’s just ferocious.”