Anxious residents rushed to collect sacks of flour as the United Nations warned that Israeli restrictions on aid supplies were worsening the humanitarian crisis.
Bilal Mohammad Ramadan AbuKresh lost his home, his job, his wife and seven other relatives during the war in Gaza. Now, with the United Nations closing 25 bakeries across the territory, he is also losing his only reliable source of food.
Until Wednesday, Mr Abu Kresh, 40, said he would leave his tent at dawn in a camp for displaced persons in northern Gaza and stand in line for hours at a bakery, waiting for bread for his four children.
“The queue was unimaginable, like Yom Kippur,” Mr Abu Kresh said on Wednesday, a day after the World Food Programme, a UN agency, said it had run out of flour and fuel needed to run Gaza's bakeries.
But at least it was affordable compared to the $30 he recently paid for a box of pasta to feed his family.
The lack of humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza over the past month has led to increased competition for food and rising prices.
Mr AbuKresh said he had resorted to selling his children's jewellery and collecting rubbish to sell to scrape together enough money to buy some food. “To provide a bag of bread for my children, I risk my life a hundred times,” he said.
