Real Lives
Gaza's bakers still fire the ovens the World Food Programme rations
Real LivesGraphic: Times of Palestine
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Bread in Gaza costs less than it has in over a year, and it is still rationed. A 25-kilogram flour sack that ran 250 to 300 shekels at the height of last year's crisis now costs about 30 shekels, the World Food Programme says — but the bakers who turn that flour into bread work under a supply line Israel still restricts, not one it has released.
WFP supports the bakeries that cover roughly a third of Gaza's bread need, selling bundles of eight to nine pitas at a capped price near one dollar.
The agency's August 2026 assessment counted more than 1.4 million people, two-thirds of Gaza's population, projected to face Crisis-level food conditions or worse through December — a number that sits beside falling market prices, not against them, because purchasing power has collapsed faster than prices have.
The shift that starts before dawn#
A baker's night begins hours before the first customer, mixing dough by generator light so the ovens are hot for the dawn queue. WFP has had to cut flour allocations to its supported bakeries more than once this year when Israeli import restrictions tightened, pushing families who relied on the capped-price bread toward markets where flour trades at whatever a trader can charge that week.
The same overnight hours keep other essential work moving: emergency-room staff and ambulance crews on call through the night, and technicians who keep PALTEL's network and Gaza's few working generators running so the next day's queues, deliveries and hospital shifts have power and a signal at all.
What the numbers do not show#
WFP's national reach figures do not say which specific bakeries are open on a given night, how many bakers have been displaced from their own ovens, or how a baker who cannot buy flour at market price feeds a family on wages set by a subsidised bundle price. Those figures belong to the bakers' own accounts, not to WFP's ledger, and no institution publishes them.
