Jean-Pierre Filiu

‘The Gaza I knew, and whose length and breadth I’ve travelled, has ceased to exist.’ Jean-Pierre Filiu, acclaimed historian of Gaza, is intimately familiar with the land’s people and places; he speaks the local dialect. But nothing prepared him for what he encountered there in December 2024. This is his unforgettable, unbearably intimate account of one month in a place shattered by Israel’s all-out war. When the historian returned to Gaza, he arrived under circumstances unimaginably different from his many past visits since 1980: only a limited number of convoys were allowed into the Strip, and he was one of the few humanitarians able to enter, this time by night. He remained inside for thirty-three days, and emerged determined to bear witness to the devastation?to the Gazans fighting simply to live, every single day. Filiu’s haunting portrait of a land betrayed is a grim work of war reportage, documented with the acuity of a historian; and a lyrical narrative of human suffering, and human dignity.

Through its millennium-long existence, Gaza has often been bitterly disputed, yet enduringly neglected. Squeezed between the Negev and Sinai deserts on the one hand and the Mediterranean Sea on the other, Gaza was contested by the Pharaohs, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Fatimids, Mamluks, Crusaders and Ottomans. In 1917, the British Empire fought for months to conquer Gaza, before establishing its mandate for Palestine. In 1948, 200,000 Palestinians sought refuge in Gaza, a marginal area wanted by neither Israel nor Egypt. Palestinian nationalism grew there, and Gaza has since found itself at the heart of Palestinian history. ? Gaza is where the fedayeen movement arose from the ruins of Arab nationalism; where the 1967 Israeli occupation was repeatedly challenged, culminating in the 1987 intifada; where the dream of Palestinian statehood appeared shattered by the 2007 split between Fatah and Hamas; and from where, in 2023, history's worst attack on Israel was launched, leading to the worst war ever waged against the Palestinians. Jean-Pierre Filiu's book was the first comprehensive history of Gaza to be published in any language. This new, updated edition covers events since 2011, including Gaza's renewed tragic centrality to world politics and security since October 2023.