By Mahmoud Issa and Saleh Salem
GAZA/DOHA (Reuters) – Asmaa al-Belbasi walks an hour every day to the nearest bakery to get bread for her children and other relatives in northern Gaza districts where aid agencies say there is still famine despite increasing supplies threatens.
The route can be dangerous, with roads littered with rubble from blown-up buildings and impassable to cars, and sporadic fighting still raging between Hamas militants and Israeli forces. Their journey shows how urgently the people of Gaza need bread to stave off deadly hunger.
“Before they opened the bakeries, we were given corn flour that you couldn’t knead. It was like a log and came out like a cookie. After a day or two it was hard to eat,” she said. We are talking about the flour that the people of Gaza make from animal feed and bake on open fires.
When the first bakery with flour and fuel from the World Food Program opened, unruly queues of hundreds of people crowded the surrounding streets between the ruined houses. The bakers had to employ dozens of administrators to maintain order.
A few more bakeries have now opened, some of which are open 24 hours a day. But even though the lines are now shorter, Belbasi still waits at least 20 minutes every day for the two bags of pita bread she says she needs for her large family.
Restoring Gaza’s bakeries and ensuring regular supplies of flour, water and fuel will be crucial to stopping the spread of famine in the tiny, overcrowded enclave nearly seven months after the conflict began.
Israel’s ground and air attack was triggered when Hamas stormed border defenses on October 7, killing about 1,200 people and taking 253 others hostage, according to Israel.
The offensive has left Gaza in ruins, killing more than 34,500 people in the Hamas-controlled enclave and leaving almost all survivors homeless and destitute, according to health authorities.
Bread has always been the staple diet of the people of Gaza, but before the war there were also many other foods, including locally grown vegetables, chickens and sheep, fresh fish from the sea, and imported canned and packaged foods.
At the start of the war, Israel announced a total blockade. Although some food then began to come in, aid agencies, including the United Nations, said they were not doing enough to facilitate deliveries and distribution.
Israel says it imposes no restrictions on humanitarian supplies to civilians in Gaza and blames the United Nations for slow deliveries, saying its operations are inefficient.
But as famine emerges in Gaza, with some children dying of malnutrition and dehydration and people hungry across the enclave, even Israel’s closest allies have increased pressure to do more to let food in.
Larger amounts of aid began flowing into the northern Gaza Strip this month after Israel opened a new border crossing, and the WFP is supplying bakeries as part of the broader effort.
But aid groups warn it is far from enough to end a humanitarian catastrophe there, and the WFP said last week that northern Gaza is still heading toward famine.
SUPPORT
The first major bakery in northern Gaza to reopen on April 13 was one of five Kamel Ajour Bakeries, which now makes flatbreads and fluffy sandwich breads and sells them at subsidized prices.
“We suffered serious damage. We have five branches and there are other sales locations, most of which were partially or completely damaged. Thank God we were able to get this place back up and running so we can bake bread for people again,” said Karam Ajour, a quality control administrator at the bakery.
To reopen, the bakery’s workers had to recover machines from various branches that had been destroyed or damaged by Israeli military action and bring them to the only branch they planned to reopen with WFP support.
They knead the bread into balls and flatten them into pockets, which puff up as they pass through the oven and are collected into large bags. They are sold through barred windows to the crowd milling outside.
Because the demand for bread was so high among the hundreds of thousands of people still living in the northern Gaza Strip, the Ajour owners decided to operate a 24-hour operation and installed a third production line there, alongside the two existing ones.
A constant supply of wheat flour and fuel to run the bakery oven is crucial. Aid deliveries to the north of the Gaza Strip were far more complex than those to the southern parts of the enclave, which are closer to the border crossings with Egypt.
In March, more than 100 people died in a botched aid delivery in the north. Earlier this month, an Israeli strike killed foreign aid workers in a convoy carrying food aid to northern Gaza. Some aid convoys were overrun by desperate, hungry people.
Karam Ajour Bakery has hired staff to handle WFP aid deliveries at two roundabouts in Gaza City and deliver them safely to the bakery.
When asked what he thought about the bakery’s reopening, Ajour said: “I am part of the people and share their feelings and their need for food.”
(Reporting by Saleh Salem in Doha and Mahmoud Issa in Gaza City, additional reporting by Emma Farge and Gabrielle Tetrault-Farber in Geneva, writing by Angus McDowall, editing by Angus MacSwan)