What does it take to get a loaf of bread in Gaza?

Nothing in Gaza is simple. Today is the first installment of a local family’s narrative on the challenge of getting something to eat during a genocide.

(According to the Gaza Health Ministry, Israeli forces killed 120 people and injured 205 others in seven massacres of families in the last 48 hours. Among the dead were journalist Wael Ibrahim Abu Quffa.)

by Kathryn Shihadah

A well-documented food crisis

For months, Gaza has been in a deep food crisis, under constant threat of famine, in addition to bombing, displacement, disease, and lack of water. In the course of the war, Gazan farmers have lost more than 90% of cattle; about 70% of farmland in Gaza has been destroyed or damaged.

Food shortage has been a fact of life for years in Gaza, but lately it has become catastrophic. Since the war began, aid groups have been raising accusations that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. The International Criminal Court agreed, issuing arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and (now former) defense minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

USAID and the US State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration also determined that Israel was blocking food aid from entering Gaza – a claim backed by the European Union, United Nations, Oxfam, and the United Kingdom.

But as long as there have been accusations, there have been denials. The Israeli government has rejected allegations that it is using starvation as a weapon of war. COGAT, the Israeli agency responsible for allowing aid into Gaza, has claimed that it is not impeding aid, and accused Gaza’s government of “aid theft”; however, US officials said they do not have evidence to support Israel’s claims.

In fact, Gaza’s Government Media Office recently reported that Israel had, since October 2023, blocked “more than a quarter of a million trucks of aid and goods.”

Israeli leaders claim that they care about Palestinians’ basic needs, and that they have been providing plenty of opportunities for food to enter the Gaza Strip – claims that appear to have no basis in reality.

In fact, one Israeli military officer, Major General Israel Ziv, told a group of foreign journalists, “The problem, by the way, in Gaza today— it’s not starvation, it’s the other way around. People can die from overeating. Seriously, the amount of food and everything there.”

Counting calories

Long before October 2023, Gaza was already “on a diet.” Due to Israel’s blockade, the people of Gaza have been struggling for years to provide food for themselves and their families.

Israel has been blocking the entrance of many food imports, as well as necessities for farming and food production.

Over the years, Israel had also bombed and destroyed many of the food processing facilities in Gaza, including flour mills and bakeries.

In short – thanks to Israel’s direct interference – Gaza has for years been unable to provide for its residents’ food needs.

To make up for the massive shortfall in supply, each day about 500 truckloads of aid entered Gaza, provided by international aid organizations.

It was in this context that the events of October 7th, 2023 unfolded.

Grievances that led up to October 7th, 2023

Gaza had been in dire straits for years – at the mercy of Israel, its de facto occupier.

Besides hunger and widespread unemployment and poverty, the people of Gaza suffer from isolation: Israel controls the borders, and makes it difficult for people to leave the enclave – or to return if they did leave.

Israel has essentially de-militarized Gaza, and its people can not fight for their rights by any traditionally legitimate means.

But all along, Israel’s occupation has been illegal under international law – a fact recognized by nearly all of the world, including the US (except for a while under the first Trump administration) – in fact, Israel as occupier has an obligation to provide for the occupied population.

On the other hand, it is within the rights of an occupied people to resist their occupier – even to the point of armed resistance.

October 7th, 2023 till today

Following these years of oppression, resistance fighters from Hamas and other organizations attacked parts of Israel with small arms on October 7th, 2023.

A total of about 1,140 Israelis were killed that day, some by Palestinian fighters, and an unknown but significant number by Israeli Apache helicopters (a fact that Israeli media has long acknowledged, but US media has hidden).

Since then, Israel has dropped 85,000 tons of bombs on Gaza (a large percentage of them American-made), killing at a bare minimum about 44,000 people – nearly 70% of them women and children (the number of fatalities is almost certainly much, much higher).

The facts have been reported consistently for many months, including by Israeli media, and significantly, by journalists on the ground in Gaza.

Words like “starvation” and “famine” are foreign to most of us; it is hard to wrap our minds around such desperation – our minds may even reject the very idea of such devastation.

(We may even, through a lifetime of conditioning, be tempted to blame Hamas for Israel’s genocide.)

Today in northern Gaza: ethnic cleansing and famine

The Israeli military is at this moment carrying out an aggressive ethnic cleansing campaign in northern Gaza. 

The UN’s humanitarian office says thousands of Palestinians in the areas of northern Gaza under siege by Israeli forces are struggling to stay alive, with virtually no food or humanitarian aid deliveries for more than 40 days.

Israeli airstrikes and tank shells have devastated entire neighborhoods and hospitals; civilians are either stuck in their homes or under fire from attack drones. 

Israeli leaders have said that the entire region will be emptied of Palestinians, and they will not be allowed to return. 

This is a violation of international law.

Southern Gaza: eyewitness accounts

Horea, Musa, and Abdullah (not their real names) report to If Americans Knew on the food situation from their homes in the Nuseirat refugee camp and Deir al Balah (their comments have been lightly edited for clarity). Today we hear from Horea about the complexity and expense of making bread at home, and the challenge of going to the bakery.

Horea says:

The south is going through a famine that it has not experienced since the war began. We are suffering from a major shortage of flour and most basic materials such as sugar, frying oil, milk, chickpeas, lentils, rice, and pasta. 

The prices of all staples have become very high.

In good times, a 25-kilo bag of flour sold for 30 shekels (about $8). Now it has gone as high as 1 kilo for 30 shekels.

If a family wants to make their own bread, they would  have to buy 2 kilos of flour, at about 30 shekels per kilo, and about 2 shekels’ worth of yeast. Then they would take it to someone with an oven (“taboon”), who would charge 5 shekels to bake the bread. The total cost would be about 37 shekels ($10) for a “loaf” (20 pieces) of [pita] bread.

If we wanted to replace the wheat flour with rice flour, it doesn’t help because the price of a kilo of rice has become equal to the price of a kilo of flour.

So it is best to get a loaf (20 pieces) of bread from the bakery for 5 shekels ($1.35 – this is UNRWA-subsidized bread].

“Each bakery has 2 gates”

Horea continues:

People line up starting at 3 am at the bakery, no matter what the weather. It opens at 8 am, and in a few hours it runs out of bread. The majority of people go home empty-handed, in tears.

The amount of bread a bakery can produce depends on how much flour they receive, and how much fuel they have for the machines.

In Nuseirat, there are two bakeries. Each bakery has two gates. The front gate is where people line up to buy bread for 5 shekels ($1.35). A few hundred of them will get a loaf of bread each day. 

At the back gate, a large number of bundles of bread are smuggled to merchants, who buy them for 5 shekels, and sell them later for 40 or 50 shekels (about $11 – $13.50). 

Also, a portion of the bread goes to the family, relatives, and friends of the bakery owner. 

People go out to the bakeries at three o’clock in the morning, wait for the bakery to open, and remain standing for up to 7 hours in the suffocating crowd, until they get a bread bundle for five shekels.  

After all the effort, the bakery soon runs out of bread.

For those who have money, they can buy bread from merchants (back-gate bread) at ten times the price. 

Those who do not have this price return to their homes broken and without getting anything to fill their children’s empty stomachs. 

So, the bakers and merchants are the occupation’s partners in starvation.

A lot of quarrels occur in the bread line, and sometimes they lead to beatings with sticks or sharp objects, whether women or men.

Children also say the worst words in order to get a loaf of bread, and they climb over people until they reach the front of the line.

Hunger takes over everything, it’s the worst thing ever.

Stay tuned for more of this first-hand account, including how Palestinian crime families and gangs have partnered with Israel to grow rich at the expense of the starving people of Gaza. We will look at how aid trucks have been hijacked and looted, and how Israel is creating a facade of philanthropy for the world – to hide its cruelty toward the people of Gaza.

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