All you need to know about the flour crisis in Gaza (Guest post by Imshin) ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, December 06, 2024

All you need to know about the flour crisis in Gaza (Guest post by Imshin)

The wonderful Jacqui Peleg, the person behind #TheGazaYouDontSee hashtag known as Imshin, created a video describing exactly how Hamas steals aid and resells it to desperate Gazans. I asked her for the transcript to make it into a guest post.

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In recent days, the media has been airing disturbing footage of massive queues outside bakeries in South Gaza, reporting terrible shortages of flour and bread.

At the same time, COGAT, the unit in the IDF responsible for coordinating and facilitating humanitarian aid for Gaza, says 18,000 tons of flour entered the Gaza Strip in November on 600 trucks.

So what’s going on? Where is all the flour?

One of the problems facing Hamas since the beginning of the war has been how to continue to pay salaries to their people, especially since the IDF has discovered and confiscated huge amounts of cash found in Hamas terror tunnels.

They’ve done all sorts of things, even resorting to robbing the banks!

But by and far the most lucrative money-making scheme has been turning a profit from the hundreds of humanitarian aid trucks that pour into the Gaza Strip weekly, and also dozens of private sector supply trucks.

Hamas regularly steals humanitarian aid trucks, taking what they need, and selling the surplus for exorbitant prices in the markets. They have even created a special unit of enforcers, the Saham Unit, ostensibly to prevent stealing of trucks, but in fact believed by many Gazans to be doing a lot of the stealing itself.

Hamas also “taxes” private sector food imports for half of their worth and more. By “taxes” I mean that armed Hamas forces stop the trucks at gunpoint and force the drivers to either pay or hand over the merchandise.

Between 16th– 17th November, 109 flour trucks were reportedly stolen after entering South Gaza via Kerem Shalom crossing. Hamas claimed the trucks were stolen by “criminal gangs”, but Gazans on social media said that the only criminal gang, capable of pulling off such a large-scale heist, was Hamas itself. This is because Hamas continues to control the population and resources in the Gaza Strip with an iron fist.

Gazan activist and journalist Hamza al-Masri commented a few days ago that one sack containing 25 kg of flour pays the salary of one Hamas Nukhba terrorist for a month.

Although food prices in general had been going up before the heist - and why this is happening is a subject for a separate article - this 109 flour truck heist was the trigger that started the so-called flour crisis.

With the heist, Hamas in effect created an artificial flour shortage, putting severe pressure on the population, and this lead to the creation - or perhaps continuation on a higher level - of yet another Hamas money-making scheme. This scheme involves running what Israeli commentator Abu Ali has called “a bread cartel” with the big bakeries.

According to COGAT, twelve big bakeries are operating in Gaza, four in North Gaza and eight in South and Central Gaza, producing close to three million pita breads a day.

The bakeries receive free flour and fuel and are supposed to sell each bag of ten pita breads for three shekels. That’s the equivalent of 83 US cents.

Descriptions I’ve seen of how the bread cartel works suggest two options:

The first option is that the queues outside the bakeries are policed by gunmen who make sure that those buying the three shekel bags are children and young girls belonging to certain families and crime gangs. The bags are then sold on for thirty to forty shekels each. That’s between eight to ten dollars.

The second option is to sell a small amount of the three shekels bags at the bakeries. Of course, everyone converges on the bakeries to try and get a bag of the subsidized bread, creating a massive crush that makes for great propaganda, for the “The Gazans are Starving” lie.

Now, I‘ve seen enough queues in Gaza to know that when they want to, the Gazans are quite capable of enforcing orderly queues, and standing patiently in line for hours on end. So, when I see one of these shocking massive crushes, I can usually tell by the source that it has been manufactured to shock and manipulate a Western audience. What’s more, it is more often than not filmed and photographed by Hamas mouthpieces, such as Hasan Eslaiah, who you may remember also participated in the October Seven Massacre.

To continue, in this second option, a large proportion of the bread is smuggled out of the back, and sold, again, for thirty to forty shekels for a bag containing ten pitas, ten times and more above the official price!

My guess is that both option one and option two are used by the bakeries in tandem.

Unsurprisingly, Gazans are tired of these games. After the heist they started to buy sacks of 25kg of flour to make their own bread, which many Gazans have been doing all along, using traditional clay ovens.

At first, the prices skyrocketed – you could pay anywhere between 600 to 1000 shekels for a sack of flour. That’s between $165 to $280. That’s if you could even find any. But relatively quickly, as additional flour trucks entered, prices started to come down again. The last I saw were around 280 to 300 shekels. That’s $78 to $83. But it’s probably come down more, and I just haven’t seen it.

Now the strange thing is that while all this fake crisis has been unfolding in South Gaza, in North Gaza there has been no flour shortage at all. On the contrary, there has been a surplus, and since prices remain low, some flour shipments to the North have even been thrown away, perhaps to keep the price up.

A few days ago, I even came across 25 kg flour sacks being sold in North Gaza for 5 shekels each! That’s $1.40 each for 25 kgs of flour! For the benefit of American readers, 25 kg are just over 55 lbs.

My message to people watching the heartbreaking footage of desperate Gazans being crushed in bread lines in Gaza, is that I’m afraid to say you are being conned. This is not to say that the Gazans in those crushes are not suffering, but that it is not the result of any real shortage, but of a manipulation to exploit both the ordinary Gazans, and you.

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Kan TV also had a story on how Hamas steals aid into Gaza.