Thursday 28 March 2024
Today I have a very good piece of news for you. My son Walid, less than two and a half years old, ate a “jaja” - in my son’s childish language, a “jaja” (dajaj in Arabic) is a chicken. I already told you how Walid had asked me for a “jaja” and I couldn’t find him one. He has always loved chicken. But since the war began, even before we left Gaza City for Rafah, he hadn’t eaten any. And whenever he watched his favourite cartoon, where you saw children eating chicken, he kept repeating: “Papa, I want some jaja, jaja, jaja!” Well, yesterday I was able to buy one for him. Chicken is a luxury for the refugees we have become.
If I was able to find one, it is because in recent days a little more food than usual has arrived and prices have gone down. Well, relatively. Things aren’t what they were before the Israeli invasion, but instead of being twenty times higher, the price of food is now only multiplied by ten.
The east-west corridor is more and more like a border
Chicken is a good example. Before the war, a chicken cost between 10 and 15 shekels ($2.26 - $3.83). Then it went up to 80 or as much 100 shekels (between $20 and $25). But now I could buy one for 50 shekels. In other words, prices have dropped from ten times the pre-war level to five times. That’s still too much for frozen chicken from Egypt, which I never used to buy at all because you can’t be sure of transport and conservation conditions. And what about now, with the lorries having to wait several days before they can enter the Gaza strip?
But I couldn’t say no to Walid.
But that was last Tuesday. Today, Thursday, the same “jaja” costs 30 shekels. A drop of two-thirds in three days. The prices of other products have gone down too. Sugar used to cost 70 shekels, now we can buy it at 40 shekels, or even 35, a 50 % drop. A 25-kilo bag of flour cost between 200 and 300 shekels. Today, it costs 35 shekels, which is almost the normal price. Baking bread had become too expensive. Now we’re going to be able to eat it again.
Apples have reappeared in the stalls, and there is even one variety we haven’t had in a long time. Walid adores them. But they are still just as expensive: 35 shekels the kilo, whereas they used to cost 24 or 30 shekels at the most.
I wanted to find out the reason for this sudden change. I tried to contact our Ministry of Economy but there was no answer. The services are very disorganised - of course - and civil servants probably avoid using the telephone for fear of being tracked. I kept on with my investigation; it concerns, you will remember, the situation of the one and a half million Palestinian refugees in the southern part of the Gaza strip, cut in half by an east-west corridor which is more and more like a border. In the north, where Gaza City is located and where there are still some 400,000 people, the situation is worse.
Hamas tried to set minimum prices
It is rumoured that the reason for this drop in prices is that Hamas has stopped levying taxes on the food aid. I got hold of some private shippers and importers (nearly one-third of food aid is private, and subject to market forces). They tell me this is not true, Hamas has never levied taxes.
There are other reasons which I can’t vouch for absolutely but which seem very plausible. First of all, for about a week now the Israelis have let through more lorries, mainly private ones. I don’t know if this is because of US or Egyptian pressures or both, but it’s a fact.
Not long ago, there were hardly more than five or ten lorries allowed into Gaza each day. Now there are 50 or even 60 private lorries per day. Second change: Hamas has stopped trying to set minimum prices. That may seem paradoxical, but that system just didn’t work. Here is how it functioned: the Hamas authorities had set up “distribution points”. They made private companies deliver their shipments to designated places, usually shops, grocery stores which had been re-opened for the purpose. There, the foodstuffs were to be sold at fixed prices.
But this method failed. Since Hamas couldn’t send out enough people to police it, a black market reared its head immediately. A lot of people were involved. The shippers only delivered a part of the goods to the shops. The shopkeepers siphoned off another portion once they were delivered. It is even possible that officials in charge of monitoring the arrival of the trucks at the border may have been in on the scam.
Sometimes UN aid was also resold
Every war has its profiteers. Even with the ongoing massacre in the Gaza strip. The scarcity of goods of every kind caused prices to rise. Long queues formed at the distribution points. People who could, shopped on the black market. They knew the right street, the right house to go to. The black marketeers made lots of money and still do.
Hamas must have realised their idea hadn’t worked and that the refugees laid the blame at their door. So they did away with the distribution points. As a result, and with the relative increase in the number of lorries coming across the Egyptian border, a bit of competition developed between private sector actors, between the few shippers (chosen by Israel, we must remember) and between retailers.
UN aid was also sometimes resold. And sometimes too, people themselves would resell a bag of flour that had been given them to be able to buy other ingredients. However it does seem that there is less of that now. For lack of cash, people are resorting more and more to barter.
And that’s the last reason for the drop in prices, but it is also important: after nearly seven months of war, people have less and less cash, whether they have been displaced - like us - or are residents of south Gaza. They have lost their jobs and their houses and all or part of their salaries. For the majority of residents and displaced persons are employed by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah which has gone on paying them even after Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007 and even though the Hamas administration no longer has work for them. However the PA pays them only a part of their wages, about 50 %. Next month, though, they are going to be raised to 70 % of their original pay. As for Hamas’ civil servants, their wages have been dropping over the past four months; they are now said to receive some 800 shekels ($200) every 40 days, more or less. Whatever the case, those sums aren’t enough to live on.
Some French banks won’t accept transfers to Palestine
People who had savings have spent them all by now. Myself, for example, I had put a little aside for a rainy day, and I’ve spent it all. Luckily enough, I get some payments from the media with which I collaborate, but collecting that money in Rafah is not so simple. Some foreign banks, especially French ones, won’t accept transfers to Gaza or Palestine in general. But the biggest problem is the lack of cash, indispensable to do any shopping.
There is only one bank open in Rafah and two ATMs. The queues for these are endless. The last wages were paid on 10 March and today, when the end of the month is near, there is still a queue. And besides, withdrawals are restricted to 1,000 or 2,000 shekels, depending on the period. When the bank says it has no more shekels, it dispenses Jordanian dinars instead, another currency used in Gaza. You have to convert them at a prohibitive rate, losing around 20 %. People can also withdraw cash directly from the foreign exchange offices which take advantage of their connections with the bank managers to act as middlemen, taking a commission of 20 % - 25 %.
Traders have fewer and fewer dollars to buy goods in Egypt. In Gaza we suffer from two wars. The Israeli army’s war, with its massacres and slaughters, and the price war, waged by the traders and the banks. People here are really exhausted by their poverty, by living in tents, by the lack of just about everything. I was thinking about all this while I scoured the neighbourhood to find something to buy. I finally brought back a little dish of mouloukhiya for the iftar (the evening meal breaking the fast). For the first time in six months we were able to eat it with chicken.
Seeing the smile on Walid’s face – he loves mouloukhiya too – was pure joy for me. I forgot about the poverty, the war, I forgot about everything. I just thought my son was happy, he was eating what he liked. We often say of kids who demand to eat what they like that they’re throwing a tantrum. Well, let me say to all parents, including French ones, that throwing a tantrum is sometimes necessary.
Translated by Noël Burch.