Gaza bakeries get bread to the north of the enclave but famine persists

Asmaa Al-Belbasi walks an hour to her nearest bakery each day to fetch bread for her children and other relatives in the north Gaza districts where aid agencies say famine still looms despite increases in supplies. The route can be dangerous, along streets strewn with rubble from blown-up buildings that are impassable to cars and with fighting between the Hamas resistance movement and Israeli occupation forces still rages sporadically. Her journey shows how desperately the Palestinians in Gaza need bread to stave off starvation.

“Before they opened up the bakeries we would get corn flour, which you couldn’t knead,” she told Reuters, referring to the flour people in Gaza made from animal feed and baked on open fires. “It was like a log and would come out like a biscuit. After a day or two it’d be difficult to eat.”

When the first bakery opened using flour and fuel provided by the World Food Programme, uncontrolled queues of hundreds of people crammed into nearby streets between the ruins of houses. The bakers had to employ dozens of stewards to maintain order. Israel has targeted Palestinian police officers who would in normal times be called upon for crowd control.

A few more bakeries have now opened, some of them operating 24 hours a day, but while the queues are now smaller, Belbasi still waits at least 20 minutes each day for the two bags of flat pitta bread she needs for her large family.

Restoring Gaza’s bakeries and ensuring a regular supply of flour, water and fuel will be crucial to stopping famine spreading across the tiny, crowded enclave nearly seven months into Israel’s brutal military offensive. The occupation state launched its offensive — which it denies is a genocide —ostensibly to destroy the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, after its October attack on southern Israel. Nevertheless, Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza. South Africa, which took the apartheid state to the ICJ, has since claimed that Israel is ignoring the court’s ruling.

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Although around 1,200 Israelis were killed on that October day, many were actually killed by Israel Defence Forces tanks and helicopters, not Hamas fighters, according to Israeli media. Just over 250 hostages were taken back to Gaza.

The occupation state’s subsequent military offensive has to-date killed 35,000 Palestinians, most of them children and women, and wounded 70,000 more. An estimated 8,000 Palestinians are missing, presumed dead, under the rubble of their homes destroyed by Israel.

More than six months into the Israeli war, vast swathes of Gaza lie in ruins, pushing 85 per cent of the enclave’s population into internal displacement amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water and medicine, according to the UN.

Bread has always been the main staple for people in Gaza, although before the war plenty of other food was available too, from locally grown vegetables, chickens and sheep, fresh fish from the sea and imported tinned and packaged food. Israel’s offensive and siege has stopped such supplies being available.

Israel announced a total blockade in October, having blockaded the Palestinian territory almost totally since 2006 — even calculating how many calories Palestinians need so as not to starve, and letting just enough goods in to this effect — but when it started to let in some food, aid agencies including those run by the UN said it was not doing enough to facilitate supplies and their distribution. The apartheid state claims that it puts no limit on humanitarian supplies for civilians in Gaza and has blamed the UN for slow deliveries, saying its operations are inefficient. However, Israeli security forces have not stopped illegal settlers from blocking and destroying aid supplies.

With pockets of famine emerging in Gaza, some children dying from malnutrition and dehydration, and people across the enclave hungry, even Israel’s closest allies have increased pressure on it to do more to let in humanitarian aid.

This started to flow in higher volumes into northern Gaza last month after Israel opened a new crossing point, and the WFP has been supplying bakeries as part of the wider effort. Even so, aid agencies warn it is still nowhere near enough to end a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, and the WFP said last week that northern Gaza is still facing a famine.

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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is meeting Israeli leaders today to discuss how to get more aid into Gaza after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of an “entirely preventable, human-made famine” there.

The first big bakery in northern Gaza that reopened, on 13 April, was one of five operated by Kamel Ajour Bakeries, which now makes pitta bread and puffy sandwich loaves to sell at a subsidised rate.

“We suffered heavy damage. We have five branches and there are other selling locations and most of them were either partially or completely damaged. Thank God we were able to re-operate this place so we can make bread for people again,” said Karam Ajour, a quality control administrator at the bakery.

To reopen, the bakery workers had to salvage machinery from different branches that had been destroyed or damaged by Israel’s military campaign, moving them to the single branch that they decided to reopen with WFP support.

They knead the bread into balls and flatten it into pockets that puff up as they pass through the oven to be put into large bags for collection. They are sold through windows with grills to the crowd pressing outside.

As demand for bread among the hundreds of thousands of people still living in northern Gaza was so high the Ajour owners decided to run a 24-hour operation, installing a third production line alongside the existing two.

A steady supply of both wheat flour and fuel to operate the bakery oven are vital. Aid deliveries into northern Gaza have been far more complex than those to southern parts of the enclave nearer the border crossings with Egypt.

In March, more than 100 people were killed by Israeli soldiers during an aid delivery in the north. Earlier last month an Israeli air strike killed foreign aid workers and their Palestinian driver in a convoy carrying food aid into northern Gaza. Some aid convoys have been mobbed by desperate, hungry people.

Karam Ajour bakeries has employed people to handle the WFP aid deliveries into two Gaza City roundabouts and bring them safely to the bakery. When asked how he felt about the bakery reopening, Ajour said: “I’m part of the people and I share their feelings and their need for food.”

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