With Bakeries and Kitchens All But Shut Down, Desperate Hunger Engulfs Gaza
Prices for essential goods are skyrocketing, 60,000 children are at risk of malnutrition, and people are foraging and scraping for food.
JABALIYA, GAZA STRIP—Mohammad Sobeh lives in a wheelchair. He has been displaced multiple times, and he resides in a tent. He is exhausted. But the biggest challenge the 45-year-old faces right now in Gaza is hunger.
“The markets are empty. There’s no flour, and when there is, it’s sold at prices I could never afford,” Sobeh told Drop Site News as he sat on the side of the road in Jabaliya, watching passersby. “The worst feeling in the world is watching your child cry from hunger, and you can’t even give them a piece of bread.”
For more than a month, Israel has cut off all food, fuel, medicine, and other supplies to Gaza—the longest closure during the 18-month siege. Along with everything else, food is quite simply running out.
On April 1, due to a lack of flour and cooking gas, the World Food Program (WFP) announced that it was shutting down all of its bakeries, cutting off one of the main sources of bread for hundreds of thousands of people. At the same time, the Head of the Bakery Owners Association in Gaza, Abdel Nasser Al-Ajrami, announced that all bakeries in Gaza had shut down—also due to shortages of flour and diesel fuel. More recently, the WFP warned its kitchens might have to shut down by next week as supplies have depleted, having already stopped distributing boxes of staple foods to families last week.
Like nearly the entire population of Gaza, Sobeh was forcibly displaced after his home in Beit Lahia was destroyed by the Israeli military at the onset of the war. He and his family sought refuge in the Zaid School in Beit Lahia. On March 22, four days after Israel resumed its scorched earth assault on Gaza, Israeli military vehicles approached the school and opened fire, forcing hundreds of families seeking shelter to flee in panic. “The occupation doesn’t differentiate between a home, a school, or a hospital,” Sobeh said.
Shortly before the war, Sobeh underwent spinal disc surgery that left him with nerve damage and partial paralysis, confining him to a wheelchair. “I couldn’t run. I couldn’t even stand,” he recalled. Amid the chaos, before they could escape the recent escalation of Israel’s bombing campaign, the family had to hide and wait until the situation calmed down. His 12-year-old son, Muatasim, pushed his father's wheelchair for miles—through debris, fear, and uncertainty. With no destination in mind, they wandered until they reached Jabaliya and—after immense difficulty—were able to secure a tent to sleep in.
"I don't want luxuries," Sobeh said. "I just want to live peacefully—a place to sit and bread for my children."
On Wednesday, the health ministry in Gaza said that 60,000 children are at risk of serious health complications due to malnutrition. Meanwhile, over the past two weeks, the Israeli military has bombed several charity kitchens—where Palestinians crowd to receive cooked meals—including one on Monday outside of Khan Younis, killing seven people, including three children.
In a joint statement on Monday, the heads of six UN agencies said, “More than 2.1 million people are trapped, bombed and starved again.” The statement added, “[w]ith the tightened Israeli blockade on Gaza now in its second month, we appeal to world leaders to act – firmly, urgently and decisively – to ensure the basic principles of international humanitarian law are upheld.”"
“You watch us being slaughtered.”
The prices for staple items, like flour and bread, have skyrocketed as a result of the blockade. Ahmed Nasr opened a community bakery in Jabaliya last year, after the end of the month of Ramadan in April 2024. “I thought of this project as a form of consolation and support for my people,” Nasr, 40, told Drop Site.
He uses traditional clay ovens. “These are the ovens our grandfathers used. We’ve gone back to the primitive life they once lived.” With shortages of gas in northern Gaza, Nasr eventually resorted to using firewood for his ovens. Yet, with Israel’s resumption of its genocidal assault last month, even collecting firewood became deadly. A farmer and Nasr’s former supplier lost two sons—18 and 19 years-old—who were killed in Beit Lahia as they were collecting firewood last month. “The occupation treats a farmer gathering wood like a terrorist, but all he wants is to feed his children,” Nasr said.
Before the latest blockade and the closure of dozens of bakeries, a bundle of bread—ten loaves—cost between two and five shekels. When the border crossings closed, prices for flour skyrocketed “from ten, twenty, thirty shekels to three hundred, four hundred per bag—[equating to] nearly $100,” Nasr said. “Even those who have money struggled to afford it.”
As bakeries shut down, Nasr went from distributing fifteen to twenty bundles a day to nearly ninety a day. He sourced flour from people with extra bags or from hoarders who sold at double the price. While the price of one bread bundle has risen to fourteen shekels, Nasr continues to sell it for five shekels, though the entire project is always at risk of shutting down.
“There are no jobs and the prices are insane,” Nasr said. Along with the rise in flour prices, yeast went from three to thirty shekels, salt from one to fifteen, and even water became difficult to access. “Flour alone doesn’t make bread. We need yeast, salt, water, and labor,” he said. “We never know if we’ll be forced to shut down tomorrow—or today. But we believe that sustenance comes from Allah.”
There have been conflicting accounts of when Israel may ease its total blockade on Gaza. Last week, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT)—the branch of the Israeli military that oversees the West Bank and Gaza—reportedly proposed a new “structured monitoring and aid entry mechanism” whereby the Israeli military or hired private companies would directly distribute aid in Gaza. In a statement, the Gaza government media office rejected the proposal “firmly and categorically,” calling it “a blatant attempt to falsely legitimize its illegal occupation and to evade its responsibilities as an occupying power.”
Meanwhile, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich dismissed the report, saying, “Not a single grain of wheat will enter the territory.
”Nasr, still holding on in his home in northern Gaza, sends a message to the world: “You watch us being slaughtered. If neighboring nations had stopped normalizing relations and torn up their peace deals, this war would’ve ended long ago!”
In Jabaliya, surrounded by a landscape of rubble, Reem Abed, a 24-year-old mother of two, struggles every day to find even a little food to feed her children, aged one and two. After running out of cooking gas and losing everything in her kitchen, Abed tries to prepare the family’s daily meals over an open fire, using cinder blocks from the remains of her damaged home.
“We haven’t received any aid since the crossings were closed, and now the bakeries are shut down. We don’t have any stock of flour left,” Abed told Drop Site. She has resorted to foraging for wild mallow that grows in the soil near her home. She also has a small stock of canned legumes and other goods. “We can’t buy or store anything; prices in the markets are astronomical, and the nightmare of displacement could strike at any moment, forcing us to leave all the food behind.”
This is not the first time the family has faced famine. They remained in the northern part of Gaza throughout the 18-month genocidal assault, during periods where the Israeli military was accused of imposing forced starvation, and when Abed was pregnant with her younger son, Mahmoud.
“My child was deprived of proper nutrition both in the womb and as an infant, because I couldn’t find healthy food during the famine. Now, he wakes up crying at night, and I have nothing to feed him except canned tomato paste,” she says. Both her children have severely weakened immune systems and are frequently ill and feverish, with limited access to medicine and treatment.
Abed gave birth to Mahmoud under extraordinary circumstances. It was February 1, 2024, and they were staying at her brother-in-law’s house after being displaced. She was lying on a bed after a long day of heavy shelling and artillery, when she suddenly felt intense pain and began to bleed. Her husband borrowed their neighbor’s animal-drawn cart to make the arduous journey to Kamal Adwan Hospital where she had a cesarean section the next morning.
“The nightmare of that night still haunts me,” Abed said through tears. “I don’t want to have more children—at least not until the world treats the women and children of Gaza like everywhere else.”
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What a disgrace that only 15 Senators have morals and are working for peace and national security. As the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe says, now that bribery isn't working (debatable now) intimidation is next. That's happening plenty.
How much longer will this horror be allowed to continue?? The so-called advanced nations of the world have either done nothing, or worse!