What does it take to get a loaf of bread in Gaza? – Day 412
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 alsodetermined 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.
MORE NEWS:
IMEMC Daily Reports.
STATISTICS OCTOBER 7, 2023 – NOVEMBER 22, 2024:
Palestinian death toll from October 7, 2023 – November 22, 2024: at least 44,969* ( 44,176 in Gaza* – 69% are women and children, according to Gaza’s Media Office). [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]
This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified. This does not include an estimated 10,000 more in Gaza still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children).
In the West Bank, Israeli soldiers and/or settlers have killed at least 793 Palestinians (~167 of them children).
In July 2024, the Lancet said: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.
Ralph Nader earlier estimated 300,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza.
- At least 60 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons.
- At least 43 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition (at least 37 of them children)**.
- About 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are currently displaced.
- About 345,000 Gazans are currently experiencing catastrophic levels of food insecurity.
Palestinian injuries from October 7 – November 22, 2024: at least 110,923 (including at least 104,473 in Gaza and 6,450 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how many Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]
Reported Israeli death toll from October 7, 2023 – November 22, 2024: ~1,582 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 404*** military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza (updated: Nov 19); 39 military and civilians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel) and~10,000 injured.
The death toll in Lebanon since October 8, 2023 is at least 3,645, with 15,355 injuries.
NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries of Israelis on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.
*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.
**Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals.
***The figure does not include the reportedly 56 Israeli soldiers – nearly 16% of the total Israeli military deaths – killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents.
† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.
Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.
Source: IsraelPalestineTimeline.org
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