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.
Mai used to consider baking at home a fallback. She no longer does. "If I bake at home, it's physically exhausting, and sometimes it costs more than buying ready bread, especially with the shortage of gas and firewood," she shares. Even so, she finds herself doing it because the alternative is joining the queues.
She goes herself when she can, reasoning that women face shorter waits than men. "But even then, the crowds are huge, and the waiting is long and tiring," she adds. Her 14-year-old son goes too. "He usually comes back empty-handed, either the queues are too long, or the bread runs out."
When she does reach the front, she often cannot complete the purchase. "Most of the time I don't have small change, so I go home without bread, or I'm forced to buy at a higher price," Mai tells The New Arab. The shortage of small-denomination currency has become a crisis within the crisis, a practical barrier that blocks transactions even when bread is nominally available.
Ibtisam Mahdi, a mother of two, puts it simply: "Bread is no longer ordinary bread. It has become a dream that is hard to reach."
A loaf that once cost three shekels ($0.80) now sells for ten ($2.65). "And you usually need exact change and cash," Ibtisam adds. For Ibtisam, the daily difficulty has curdled into something larger. "Are we facing the beginning of a famine?" she asks. "Or have we already entered one without announcing it?" She does not offer the question rhetorically.
"Gaza today does not need descriptions," she says. "It needs a real answer: where are we going?"
Abu Ahmad Ajour, 48, a father of three, spent hours queuing at multiple distribution points on a recent day and came back empty-handed.
"I stood in more than one place for hours, and in the end I couldn't get a single loaf," he tells The New Arab. What bread is available, he says, falls far short of what a family needs. "One loaf is not enough for us. We need more, not less, but the reality is the opposite." A market in collapse The price spike is not random. Economic analyst Ahmad Abu Qamar describes a straightforward supply-demand breakdown: production has fallen by around 30% while demand has held steady or grown.
"Naturally, this leads to price increases and the emergence of a black market," he says.
The causes are structural. Fuel shortages have disabled bakery generators. Lubricating oil and spare parts remain blocked at Israeli-controlled crossings.
The number of aid trucks entering the strip has been sharply curtailed. When subsidised goods cannot reach people through official channels, they leak into informal markets, and families who cannot pay the difference go without.
"The crisis is not only about price," Ahmad says.
"It extends to the supply chain itself, the reduction in aid trucks, the decline in production, disabled bakeries, diesel shortages, and the absence of oils and spare parts. The cost of accessing bread rose before the price of bread did." The card system proposal Inside Gaza, some are attempting to think past the immediate crisis.
Journalist Mohammed al-Lala, writing on social media, has proposed a rationing system he argues would close the gap through which subsidised bread flows into the black market.
Under his proposal, the WFP would issue each household a monthly card linked to their national ID number, entitling families of four or fewer to one loaf per day, and families of more than six to two.
Each household would pay the bakery a nominal two to three shekels ($0.55–$0.80) per loaf. Production quotas and beneficiary numbers would be assigned to each bakery by geographic zone, so residents collect from the bakery nearest their displacement location.
Mohammed argues the system would "regulate distribution, address the small-change problem, and reduce the leakage of bread into the black market."
He also proposes either eliminating separate distribution points or integrating them into the bakery network to consolidate operations and reduce the friction that currently pushes bread toward informal sellers.
Ahmad agrees on the diagnosis, if not the specific mechanism. The solution, he says, requires action on three fronts simultaneously: "Restarting bakeries, securing fuel and flour, and controlling the leakage of bread into the black market."
Without all three, any single intervention will be absorbed by the same structural failure that produced the crisis.
For Mai, Ibtisam, and Abu Ahmad, the proposals are distant from the reality of each morning's queue.
The bread either arrives or it does not. The change comes back, or it does not. The son returns with a loaf, or he does not.
That is the calculation Gaza's families are running, every day, before anything else. Ansam Al Qitaa is a freelance journalist based in Gaza. For years, she has covered the successive wars in Gaza and their humanitarian and social impacts for international and local outlets This piece is published in collaboration with Egab