Bassam Qanna stands outside his bakery, which has been shut down for days now, as more than a thousand people pass by every day asking if there’s any bread. Each time, he has to tell them the same thing: his cooking gas has run out, and he can’t get more. His bakery, like many others in Khan Younis, relies entirely on the World Food Program, which provides everything needed to make bread in exchange for a portion of the bakery’s output — usually 30 to 50 percent.
Qanna’s bakery produces 360 bags of bread a day. But now it is one of six bakeries that have closed due to Israel’s closure of Gaza’s crossings, blocking essential aid, including fuel, and making it impossible to operate. Retailers of basic goods, like Qanna, are forced to shut down.
“I have everything ready in my bakery. If I had cooking gas, I would start right away and provide bread for people. I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute, but I can’t work because there’s no gas,” Qanna tells Mondoweiss. He points out that there are no alternatives for commercial ovens, and since the war, firewood prices have soared. Before the war, firewood cost 0.5 shekels per kilo; now it’s over 50 shekels.
“If the crossings stay closed and fuel is cut off, how are we supposed to work?” he asks. “There’s no substitute for gas, and firewood isn’t an option. Its price is much higher than gas when it’s available.”
Since the ceasefire began in mid-January, Israel’s violations of the agreement have been systematic. Israel has actively sought to prevent the second phase of the ceasefire, which was supposed to see the start of negotiations over a permanent end to the war.
The first phase of the ceasefire ended more than a week ago, but there’s been no progress in negotiations, which involve Israel, Hamas, and, more recently, the U.S., which has been engaged in direct and unmediated talks with Hamas. But since early March, Israel has closed Gaza’s crossings and prevented the entry of humanitarian aid and fuel. The closures have further exacerbated the suffering of Gaza’s civilian population, which has endured 15 months of genocidal war and famine conditions.
Residents who spoke to Mondoweiss fear the return of famine as markets quickly lose goods and supplies dwindle, causing prices to soar.
Alongside the continuous shelling and strikes against civilians in Gaza’s border areas ever since the first phase of the ceasefire ended, Gaza residents tell Mondoweiss that they continue to an endless war being waged against them by Israel.
Hamas has sharply criticized Israel’s closure of the crossings, calling it a starvation tactic aimed at securing political leverage. “The occupation continues to stall, imposing a total siege and starving the people of Gaza,” Hazem Qassem, Hamas spokesperson in Gaza, tells Mondoweiss. “This will not work with Hamas or the Palestinian people. We will continue to defend our right to force the occupation to end the war, withdraw, and negotiate a real prisoners exchange.”
“The occupation is trying to starve Gaza into submission to gain political concessions. This is a new form of terrorism, and it will not extract anything from the resistance regarding the ceasefire agreement,” Qassem adds.
Fuel shortages have also hit Gaza hard. According to the ceasefire agreement, 50 fuel trucks were meant to enter Gaza on a daily basis, but with crossings now closed, power plants are warning that they are running out of fuel.
Salama Maarouf, director of the Government Media Office in Gaza, says the ongoing closure of the crossings is a crime against humanity affecting more than 2.1 million people.
“The closure first affects food provision, as the population is entirely dependent on aid and food parcels, while all supply sectors have ground to a halt due to Israeli aggression,” Maarouf tells Mondoweiss. “It also impacts water access, as municipalities can no longer operate wells that rely on fuel or supply potable water from desalination plants, which also depend on fuel.”
“This is a war crime — a crime against humanity — that adds to the suffering of Gaza’s residents, who are already living through the consequences of the 15-month war of extermination waged by the occupation,” Maarouf adds.
Amnesty International:
In response to Israel cutting off the electricity supply to a desalination plant for drinking water in the occupied Gaza Strip a week after it blocked the entry of vital humanitarian aid to the Strip, Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research, Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns, Erika Guevara Rosas said:…“Israel’s decision to cut off electricity to Gaza’s main operational desalination plant, a week after it halted the entry of all humanitarian aid and commercial supplies, including fuel and food, violates international humanitarian law and is further evidence of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/03/israels-decision-to-cut-off-electricity-supply-to-gaza-desalination-plant-cruel-and-unlawful/
Jonathan Cook: BBC’s ‘Road to Oct 7’ an Utter Travesty
March 10, 2025
The series serves Israel’s interest in reviving the genocide in Gaza and spreading Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing operations to the West Bank.
“There has been a prolonged furore over the BBC’s craven decision to ban a documentary on life in Gaza under Israel’s bombs after it incensed Israel and its lobbyists by, uniquely, humanising the enclave’s children.
The English-speaking child narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah, who became the all-too-visible pretext for pulling the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone because his father is a technocrat in the enclave’s Hamas government, hit back last week.
He warned that the BBC had betrayed him and Gaza’s other children, and that the state broadcaster would be responsible were anything to happen to him.
His fears are well-founded, given that Israel has a long track record of executing those with the most tenuous of connections to Hamas — as well as the enclave’s children, often with small, armed drones that swarm through its airspace.
The noisy clamour over How to Survive a Warzone has dominated headlines, overshadowing another new BBC documentary on Gaza — this one a three-part, blockbuster series on the history of Israel and Palestine — that has received none of the controversy.
And for good reason.
Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October, whose final episode aired Monday, is such a travesty, so discredited by the very historical events it promises to explain, that it earns a glowing, five-star review from The Guardian.
It “speaks to everyone that matters,” the liberal daily gushes. And that’s precisely the problem.
What we get, as a result, is the very worst in BBC establishment TV: talking heads reading from the same implausibly simplistic script, edited and curated to present Western officials and their allies in the most sympathetic light possible.”
“But this documentary series on the region’s history should be far more controversial than the film about Gaza’s children. Because this one breathes life back into a racist western narrative — one that made the genocide in Gaza possible, and justifies Israel’s return this month to using mass starvation as a weapon of war against the Palestinian people.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/03/10/jonathan-cook-bbcs-road-to-oct-7-an-utter-travesty/
The author of this article keeps obliquely writing about Israel’s supposed efforts to gain “political advantage.” He lacks the honesty to explicate that there are still innocent hostages still being held in Gaza, and that the children among them have been murdered. Evidently, Hamas prefers to keep its hostages and practice its sadistic cruelty on them than to see its suffering people (suffering that it has incurred for them, that is) have food and electricity.