A lack of cash leads to bartering

People walk through a market in the rain — People brave the winter weather in a market in Nuseirat in late November 2024.
Saed Abu Nabhan APA images

In December, Israa Bahou, 34, went to the central market place in Deir al-Balah.

The mother of four had no money. Instead, she carried cans of peas and beans that she hoped to swap for cans of corn and lentils.

Bahour told The Electronic Intifada that the food aid she had obtained from the World Food Programme did not meet her family’s needs.

“We get canned foods that we do not consume often, such as peas and chickpeas, so I exchange them with other people for other canned foods, such as beans and corn, which my children love, or flour and oil if I can.”

Following the ceasefire on 19 January, banks have now resumed operations in Gaza. But bartering became commonplace in Gaza during Israel’s genocidal aggression when, according to the World Bank, Israel destroyed or damaged 93 percent of local bank branches and no cash entered for 15 months.

Social media became a major arena for bartering, with many Facebook groups dedicated to allowing people to trade goods.

The owner of the “Confused Angel” account, for instance, wrote a post on one such group on 19 December offering “2 kilos of sugar and 2 liters of cooking oil” for “5 kilos of flour.”

Salaries in kind

Muhammad Ayesh, 47, said he had no other way to provide for his family’s needs except to resort to bartering. Ayesh is a government employee that normally would receive a monthly salary from the Palestinian Authority.

But with no banks functioning, he had no way of accessing these funds. So he turned to swapping aid with others in the same situation.

“I gave my neighbor a kilo of flour that I received as relief aid, in exchange for him giving me a kilo of sugar and half a kilo of table salt,” Ayesh told The Electronic Intifada back in September,

And bartering was not merely used by private individuals. Fouad Obeid, a grocery store owner in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, said the lack of cash meant he would pay his employees with goods from his shop.

“At the end of each work day, I give my workers food items of their choice, such as sugar and cooking oil, instead of money because of the lack of cash,” Obeid told The Electronic Intifada in December.

“Customers don’t pay cash because they don’t have any,” he explained. Some would barter, others would pay via electronic bank transfers, transferring money from their bank accounts to his.

Obeid also said that he paid importers for his goods in the same way, transferring money digitally.

On May 8 last year, the Palestine Monetary Authority had called on Palestinians in Gaza to use any available electronic means to carry out their financial transactions.

A last resort

Mohammed Abu Jiyab, an economist and the editor in chief of the Gaza newspaper El-Eqtesadia, said the prevalence of bartering in Gaza was a “reflection of the complete collapse of the local economic cycle.”

He pointed out that the Israeli genocide destroyed sources of income for tens of thousands of families and drained their savings, spent to cover basic needs and displacement costs.

“The financial blockade imposed by Israel, preventing the entry of funds and destroying the banking infrastructure, has created a stifling cash crisis,” Abu Jiyab said.

He said that bartering was a result not only of “cash” poverty but also “resource” poverty, noting that residents are trapped in a closed circle of exchanging needs without any possibility of improvement in their economic conditions.

“This situation has become the last resort for the residents of the Strip to survive in the midst of this ugly war,” he said.

Rasha Abou Jalal is a journalist in Gaza.