The price for a 25-kilogram (55-pound) sack of flour has skyrocketed to as high as $100 — up from about $15 before the war.
“Numbers that are really, really beyond any capacity,” Najla Shawa, a Palestinian humanitarian aid worker who recently left Gaza, said of the soaring wartime prices. Other commodities and essentials, down to the containers Gazans use to collect water, she said, have also become perilously expensive.
“Even if you have the money,” Shawa said, “the trip to get it is very dangerous and it’s really difficult and humiliating.”
Shawa said the people she has spoken to in Gaza are rationing water. “They are really trying to consume very little,” she said. “A cup a day. A couple of cups a day for the adults, giving priority to children.”
Hazem Zarifa, a 24-year-old university student sheltering in the southern city of Khan Younis, said he has walked miles searching for a little bread or some canned food.
“I have so far lost more than 10 kilograms of weight” — about 20 pounds — Zarifa said. He felt sick from hunger.
