When I rewind the reel of memory, unforgettable scenes leap to mind: death journeys in which men and young people were exposed to peril just to secure a little wheat or corn flour for making bread.
I live beside a large cemetery; at least four funerals pass in front of my house every day, while the bread cart passed scarcely once a month. That is how life went on for six long months, during which I often found myself joining many of those funerals… for I am the neighbor of the cemetery.
A few days ago, I bought twenty pieces of bread for less than a single dollar! Astonishing… for during the famine of the war, a single kilogram of flour had reached nearly thirty-four dollars.
Throughout the war—stretching from October 2023 to October 2025—Gaza endured an imposed starvation campaign in which the Israeli government prevented relief organizations from freely delivering flour to more than 2.3 million people.
The crisis went through varying stages, but it intensified between March and October 2025.
Today we are living the very opposite of the worst humanitarian catastrophe Palestinians had faced since 1948: the bread crisis.
It is true that bread has been a symbol of uprisings among the hungry in many countries, but I do not believe that what happened in Gaza has any parallel in the geography of the world.
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Europe and the Arab world watched as their sense of shock collapsed before the images of famine that claimed the lives of dozens of innocent people—most of them children. Those images pushed several countries to dispatch aircraft that dropped bread and food from the sky, following global protests that swept the streets of many cities.
And today?
We witness an astonishing abundance: bread prices are lower than they were before 7 October 2023; loaves overflow in the streets; and motorcycles fitted with cargo boxes roam the neighborhoods at least twice a day.
Bread remains the most stable element on the Gazan table—three meals a day rarely go without it. In a society where the average household has five members, each family consumes more than forty kilograms of flour monthly.
As for my own family—seven members—we used to need around fifty kilograms before the war, and even more during winter, when the nightly “sandwich rounds” begin.
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During the days of famine, on one of my morning rounds in search of bread, I saw a friend cutting down a mulberry tree whose branches had crept into his windows. It happened during a moment of severe hunger—four days had passed without tasting a single loaf. The tree leaves stirred my imagination—for I knew some peoples cooked them—so I hid a small branch carrying ten leaves, washed them well… and ate them in complete reassurance!
The people of northern and central Gaza had gone through a milder famine in early 2024, forcing them to eat tree leaves and animal fodder. But the April 2025 famine—which lasted five months—unified the fate of the entire population.
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Churchill’s famous line comes to mind: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
A declaration he made before the House of Commons in 1940.
And today—Mr. Churchill—we are in dire need of blood, work, and sweat… after we finally secured bread, and along with it inherited a city whose destruction resembles that of European towns crushed by Nazism. But Gaza, sadly, has no warm shoulders left to lean on.
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When we place bread on the table today, we place beside it the story of our suffering with the “flour gangs” that sold a single kilogram for forty dollars, while a sack of wheat flour (25 kg) had once cost only ten.
Even the yeast—during famine days—was sold at three dollars for every ten grams! Today, 450 grams cost barely a dollar and a quarter. A picture that captures the cruelty of a war that equalized rich and poor before the loaf.
Last summer, the “flour thieves” were the only source of supply; they stole it under streams of gunfire at the American aid centers—four of which were opened under Israeli military protection—around which thousands of dead and wounded fell.
Those centers began operating in May and continued until early October 2025. They were nights of real terror: gunfire, gangs looting flour, stabbings… and bodies trampled beneath the feet of desperate people running through bullets while carrying flour bags that once reached eighty dollars per kilogram.
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Today, bread surpasses the needs of the population. People are regaining—partially—their strength after the famine caused many to lose significant weight, fall ill, and grow frail. More than 400 people—most of them children—died according to the Ministry of Health.
The Gaza Strip lives in a troubling contradiction, the sharpest of which, recently, has been the issue of bread: a commodity that deserted the table for months, only to return in unbelievable abundance.
No wonder the famine opened the door for some to become wealthy in a matter of nights: thieves and opportunists who hijacked aid trucks, sold flour on their own terms, and demanded “clean,” unworn banknotes.
I know their faces—those who blackmailed us for months. I see them today behind shopping carts in malls, buying whatever they fancy, with the latest iPhones resting in their pockets.
O tiny, contradictory planet of Gaza…
A place that humiliated the noble and the decent, where hundreds died—simply for bread.
Mohammed Ballour