Bilal Mohammad Ramadan AbuKresh has lost his home, his job, his wife and seven other relatives during the war in Gaza. Now, as the United Nations closes 25 bakeries across the territory, he is also losing his only reliable source of food.
Before Wednesday, Mr. AbuKresh, 40, said he would leave his tent in a camp for displaced people in northern Gaza at dawn and stand in line for hours at one of the bakeries, waiting for bread for his four children.
“The line was unimaginable, like the Day of Judgment,” Mr. AbuKresh said on Wednesday, the day after the World Food Program, a U.N. agency, said it had run out of the flour and fuel needed to keep the bakeries in Gaza open.
But at least it was affordable, compared to the $30 he paid for a bag of pasta that he bought recently to feed his family.
The lack of humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza over the past month has prompted violent competition for food and driven up prices.
Mr. AbuKresh said he has resorted to selling his children’s jewelry and collecting trash to sell to scrounge up enough money just to buy a bit of food. “To secure a bag of bread for my children, I risk death a hundred times,” he said.
As well as the bakery closures, the World Food Program said on Tuesday that it would distribute its last food parcels by Thursday, and that its remaining supplies in Gaza were expected to run out within two weeks.
The announcement prompted desperate Gazans to rush to U.N. warehouses this week to haul away heavy bags of flour that were being handed out.
The decision to close the bakeries came almost a month after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel ordered a halt to all humanitarian aid into Gaza, in an attempt to pressure Hamas into accepting a new hostage release deal as cease-fire negotiations have stalled.
The aid has not resumed and a fragile two-month truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed two weeks later, when Israel launched new airstrikes on the territory.
The bakeries used as much as 300 tons of flour each day, producing enough bread to supply about 70 percent of Gaza’s population, Abdel Nasser al-Ajrami, head of the enclave’s bakers’ association, said in an interview. Five other bakeries in Gaza had already closed last month, he said, when they ran out of supplies.
“Where will people get their food from?” Mr. al-Ajrami said, worrying aloud that Gaza was headed toward an even deeper humanitarian crisis. The United Nations has said the escalating war in Gaza has led to “unprecedented” need for aid, estimating 91 percent of its population is facing acute food insecurity.
Nearly one-third of the bread made at the U.N.-funded bakeries was distributed for free, he said, and much of the rest was sold as packets of pita for as little as 50 cents.
“It was a way to support thousands of Gazans who lost their jobs and a source of income during the war,” Mr. al-Ajrami said, voicing concern that food shortages could lead to unrest.
“This might cause chaos again across Gaza as people would start fighting for a piece of bread. There might be looting again,” he said.
For weeks, the United Nations has sounded the alarm that humanitarian aid supplies were dwindling, and that attempts to gain access for aid convoys lined up at the border crossings had failed. It has accused Israel of routinely denying U.N. requests for broader efforts to coordinate humanitarian movement inside the enclave, and has said the Israeli army’s no-go zones and evacuation order areas covered more than half of Gaza.
COGAT, the Israeli military unit responsible for coordinating aid deliveries to Palestinian territories, said in a social media post on Tuesday that 450,000 tons of assistance was delivered to Gaza during the two-month cease-fire, and less than 30 percent of it was from the United Nations.
“Meaning, when the U.N. say they have 2 weeks worth of aid left in Gaza, there are plenty of other aid organizations and other actors with food aid,” COGAT said. “Much of the aid was diverted and available on the markets,” it added. “There is enough food for a long period of time, if Hamas lets the civilians have it.”
In a sharp response to Israel, U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said aid must be allowed into Gaza immediately and called claims that Gaza had enough food “ridiculous.”
“W.F.P. doesn’t close its bakeries for fun,” he told reporters at the U.N. headquarters in New York. “If there’s no flour, if there’s no cooking gas, the bakeries cannot open.”
During the cease-fire, “we saw humanitarian aid flood Gaza,” he said. “We saw markets come back to life. We saw prices going down. We saw hostages released, we saw Palestinian detainees released. We need to go back to that.”
Mr. AbuKresh said his family was living in “unimaginable circumstances” and barely surviving.
“This is beyond description,” he said. “We’ve surrendered to death.”
Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.
