A day in a Khan Younis breadline

The Electronic Intifada

Khan Younis’s Doha Bakery is where the author buys bread for around one dollar

I wake up early and I put on my clothes quietly.

It’s after dawn, and the sky is tinted a soft orange. The sun is not yet fully ablaze and there is a cool breeze. I wonder if it will stay that way, and I hope it will, because waiting in the breadline for hours with the sun overhead gives me a headache.

I put on my shoes and hear my mother telling me to hurry up, that we have a long line awaiting us.

The walk to Doha Bakery in Khan Younis takes about 10 minutes. Before the war, I would walk to university and sometimes near the sea, and I enjoyed these walks. But the walk to the breadline, to join an immense crowd of people pleading for loaves of bread – this is not the same kind of walk.

On 2 March, prices skyrocketed in Gaza when Israel announced that it would close the crossings and stop the entry of all goods, including food, into Gaza.

In the weeks that followed, many bakeries shuttered, hanging signs on their doors that read “Closed due to fuel shortage.”

The Doha Bakery, which is supported by the World Food Program, was one of the few that remained open. This means it’s extra crowded, and that we will wait for hours to get a single loaf of bread, which costs about a dollar.

A worker came outside and pushed open the iron fence surrounding the bakery and announced, “Bread distribution will start at 11 AM.”

It was around 10 am, still an hour to go.

Doha Bakery

The bakery itself is a medium-sized building, with a broken staircase leading to the entrance. Outside is a thrumming generator that keeps the place running, and inside are cracked machines. The building is full of bullet holes, and the sun filters through them and the clouds of flour that surround the place.

Children climbed onto the fence and peaked through the holes in the doors to watch the bakers prepare the bread.

Time crawled slowly. Minutes felt like hours. The sun I had hoped to avoid had finally found us in line.

I studied for an exam on my phone, but it was hard to concentrate with all the voices around me.

In front of me was a woman in her fifties with strands of white hair visible through her headscarf. Her hands had been blackened by firesmoke, likely from long hours spent cooking over a fire.

She told me how her husband was martyred in December 2023 by an Israeli airstrike on Khan Younis. He had been sitting with his friends when the house they were in was targeted.

“They told me, ‘Your husband was martyred,’ but I didn’t believe them,” she said. “But then my heart felt it, so I went to Nasser Hospital to ask about him.”

She said she saw him in the morgue and couldn’t stop screaming. She said she yelled at him, “Why did you leave me alone?”

She told me the story three more times before she got tired of waiting in the breadline and left.

Another woman was speaking to my mother. She said she was from Beit Hanoun, near the boundary crossing there. They had been displaced from there to Khan Younis, then to Rafah and back.

“Now, we’re staying in a UNRWA school because our home was demolished. One of my daughters attends school, another fetches water and the third tidies up the classroom where we are staying. Each day, they switch roles, and I come to the bakery, trying to adapt to this harsh life.”

It was now 11 am. Time for distribution to begin.

First 10 women, first 10 men

A worker let the first 10 women and the first 10 men into the bakery.

A commotion arose, and voices emerged from the crowd.

“Can you give me bread?”

“I need to leave to prepare food!”

“I can’t stand and wait any longer!”

“I have a heart condition – I can’t stand in line!”

“I have a baby at home, I need to get back to him.”

More voices echoed the same desperate pleas.

But the bakery won’t fit more than 20 people inside, so the worker closed the gates again, and the waiting continued. After about 30 minutes, the same process repeats: doors open; people plead for bread; doors close.

The bakery doesn’t close until about 10 minutes before the Maghrib prayer call, around 5:50 pm that day.

Our turn came at around 2:30 pm.

As I received the bread from the baker, I felt nothing, just the exhaustion of the six and a half hours we spent waiting.

My mother remarked that we were among the lucky few, not only to have bread but also to have it in time to prepare food before iftar, the meal with which we break our fast for Ramadan.

We left the bakery and the crowds didn’t seem to be shrinking. I thanked God that we no longer had to wait.

Pizza for iftar

That day was my younger brother’s birthday, and we planned to make him pizza.

We gathered all the ingredients and then took the pizzas to the communal clay oven nearby, which costs about a dollar for a few minutes.

This way of cooking is much more affordable, because we don’t have gas to power our stove. The price of a few gallons of gas is around $50.

We then started lighting the fire to prepare some tea.

As the Maghrib prayer was called, we had our meal and then I went to my computer to complete an exam – the one I had tried to study for in line.

I took my cup of sage tea, walked to my handmade wooden desk, opened my laptop and started the exam.

It was quite easy – I finished it within half an hour and scored 29 out of 30.

I had another cup of tea and went straight to bed, ready to do it all again the next day.