With aid falling short, Gaza families are left struggling each day to put bread on the table
A Palestinian woman makes pita bread in the tents city in Rafah, January 2024
Ansam Al Qitaa reports in The New Arab on 8 April 2026
Every morning, Mai Murshid wakes up to the same thought: “How am I going to get bread for my children?” The 37-year-old mother of four tells The New Arab, “It’s the first thing on my mind. Every day I wake up to the bread crisis.”
For most of Gaza’s history, bread was an unexceptional staple, but it has now become a scarce, priceless commodity.
A loaf cost three shekels ($0.80) under the World Food Programme’s subsidised distribution scheme. Today, that same loaf sells in the market for between seven and fifteen shekels ($1.85–$4.00), a markup of up to 400%, while a bag of flour has jumped from 25 to 70 shekels ($6.70 to $18.70).
For families whose income has collapsed, and aid dependency runs close to universal, the arithmetic is brutal: bread has shifted from a right to a commodity, and for many, an unaffordable one.
With roughly 95% of Gaza’s families dependent on humanitarian aid, the strip’s most basic food has become its most visible crisis. The queues outside bakeries form before dawn. By the time most residents arrive, the bread is often already gone. What remains is a choice between paying black market prices or going without, a choice that repeats itself every day, with no resolution in sight.