Fidaa Hassan was a nurse. She spent years keeping people alive. Now she spends her days looking for bread.
Her two-year-old cries for it each morning. Her ten-year-old, Firas, has stopped growing the way children are supposed to. His cheeks have gone hollow, the kind of hollowness that takes months of hunger to build, not weeks. In her shelter in western Gaza, a kilo of flour costs 150 shekels. Forty dollars. She doesn't have forty dollars.
Before October 2023, a bundle of twenty-one loaves cost less than one.
3,000 Times
That is the multiplier. Flour in Gaza, ordinary wheat flour, the thing bread is made from, is now 3,000 times more expensive than before the war. The World Food Programme published that number. Not an advocacy group. The United Nations' own food agency, which tracks prices in crisis zones the same way it has for decades.
If your morning coffee cost 3,000 times what it did two years ago, a standard cup would run you around fifteen thousand dollars. The analogy is imperfect (coffee is a luxury, bread is not) but that is exactly the point. Flour is not a luxury. In Gaza, it has the price of one.
At the worst points in northern Gaza, a 25-kilogram bag of flour, the kind that costs five to ten dollars in ordinary times, reached a thousand dollars. Sugar crossed a hundred dollars per kilogram. Hani Abu Rizq, thirty-one years old, from Gaza City, tied two bricks around his stomach to hold the hunger back long enough to feed his mother and seven siblings from whatever was left. "I went back to what people did in ancient times," he said. "This isn't just war. It's an intentional famine."
He is right. But the word intentional needs to be demonstrated, not asserted. So here is the sequence.
The Sequence
On October 8, 2023, one day after the Hamas attack, Israel imposed a complete siege on Gaza. The Defence Minister stated it plainly: no food, no water, no fuel, no electricity. That was the policy from day one. What followed was the policy being carried out.
Before the siege, about 500 trucks a day entered Gaza carrying food and commercial goods. Through much of 2025, UN OCHA data showed less than 35 percent of the daily food requirement entering, even on days when crossings were nominally open. Quotas. Scanning delays. Convoys rerouted through corridors that aid workers described as actively dangerous.
While the crossings were being throttled, Gaza's ability to feed itself was being dismantled from the inside. Flour mills destroyed. Bakeries bombed. Markets, agricultural land, livestock: Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor documented the destruction of the entire internal food infrastructure. Aid was made the only source of food for two million people. Then those bringing the aid were killed. At least 563 people shot, bombed, or crushed while waiting for or distributing food assistance.
There is a military doctrine for this. History has recorded it in Bengal, in Ukraine, in Leningrad. The mechanism is always the same. Cut the supply. Destroy the source. Wait.
Who Goes First
Hunger is not random. It follows a hierarchy so consistent it has been documented in every siege, every famine, every blockade on record.
Children go first. Then pregnant women. Then the elderly. By December 2025, the IPC, the international body that classifies food emergencies, had placed 1.6 million people, 77 percent of Gaza's population, in Crisis or worse. More than half a million in Emergency. Over 100,000 in Catastrophe, the classification that sits just below famine. Famine itself was confirmed in northern Gaza in August 2025, the first famine formally declared in the twenty-first century to occur under an active military siege.
A ceasefire followed. Crossings reopened, partially. Conditions improved, partially. The children are still hungry.
One Paragraph on the Law
Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a war crime. Article 8 of the Rome Statute says so. It covers impeding relief supplies, destroying food sources, deliberately depriving a civilian population of what it needs to survive. Human Rights Watch named it in December 2023. Oxfam named it. In November 2024, the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber found reasonable grounds that Netanyahu and Gallant bore personal responsibility for causing starvation as a method of war. Arrest warrants were issued.
The law exists. The warrants exist. The famine continues.
What Remains
Somewhere in a camp, a baker named Abu Hussein still tries to open. Some days there is dough. Most days there isn't: flour either unavailable or priced beyond reach, the fuel to run the oven uncertain. Families queue anyway, because queuing is the last form of hope that costs nothing.
Parents grind animal feed into something breadlike. Teachers run classes under open sky in roofless buildings, because to stop teaching is to agree there is no future worth preparing for. A woman who spent her career keeping people alive now begins each morning unable to give her toddler the simplest thing he asks for.
They are hungry. They are still here.
The hunger is the policy. The steadfastness is theirs, and it was never supposed to last this long.