Rabab Deifallah owns almost nothing that still works the way it used to. But she guards one object as if her family’s next meal depends on it, because it does. It is a small, battered lighter that her son has repaired more times than she can count. Every evening she presses the striker wheel, waits for the spark to catch, and only then can she light the wood that will bake bread, boil water and warm a pot of lentils for her five children.
Before October 2023, a lighter like hers cost a third of a dollar, and shops in Gaza sold three of them for the price of one shekel. Today, according to reporting by Al Jazeera, a replacement lighter can cost between 27 and 33 dollars, more than many families in Gaza earn in a week. Rabab recently paid 12 dollars just to have hers fixed rather than buy a new one, a decision she describes as a direct trade against a bag of flour.
It is tempting to read this as a small, almost quaint detail buried inside a much larger catastrophe. It is not. The lighter shortage is a precise, physical illustration of how siege economics actually function, how humanitarian promises collide with bureaucratic control, and how ordinary people build entirely new professions and markets simply to keep a flame alive. Understanding why a two dollar object now costs thirty dollars in Gaza means understanding import restrictions, fuel politics, ceasefire enforcement and the economics of scarcity all at once.
The Small Object Deciding Whether Gaza Families Eat Hot Food
Fire has become the organizing principle of daily life for displaced families across Gaza. With cooking gas scarce and electricity unreliable, households increasingly depend on open wood fires to bake bread, boil water and prepare food, a shift documented in the same Al Jazeera report that introduced Rabab’s story. That dependence on fire places enormous weight on the one tool needed to start it.
Hasnaa Mansour, a mother of six displaced from the Jabalia refugee camp, described spending an entire morning trying to light a clay oven without success, eventually sending her young daughter out with a piece of cardboard to find a neighbour’s fire she could carry home. Shadi Abu Shamlah, sheltering with his family at a school west of Gaza City, said the entire school compound, home to dozens of displaced families, might contain no more than four working lighters at any given time. “If you have a lighter in your tent, you’re okay,” he told Al Jazeera. “If you don’t have one, you’re stuck.”
These are not isolated hardships. They describe a supply chain so constrained that a single spark becomes a shared, borrowed and sometimes purchased resource, passed between tents the way people might once have shared a cup of sugar. The shortage has also created a genuinely new occupation. Tamer Al Shawish, a 24 year old who worked as a driver before the war, now repairs lighters at a small roadside stall, salvaging flints and valves from broken units to keep others alive. “Before the war, no one needed to repair a lighter,” he said. “They were cheap and available. When the gas ran out, we would throw it away and buy another one.”
To understand why that simple act, throwing away a broken lighter and buying a new one, stopped being possible, it helps to look at how Gaza’s borders actually work, and why an object as ordinary as a lighter can become entangled in a system built to control far more dangerous things.
Why a Cigarette Lighter Can Count as a Restricted Item at Gaza’s Crossings
Since Israel tightened its closure of Gaza in 2007, the territory’s access to outside goods has been governed by an evolving system of import controls. Following the 2010 flotilla incident, Israel shifted from a narrow list of permitted goods to what amounted to a blacklist model, allowing most items to enter except weapons, military material and a broad category of goods that Israeli authorities classify as having both civilian and military applications, generally referred to as items requiring special coordination.
According to research by the Israeli human rights organisation Gisha, that restricted category has historically gone far beyond the internationally recognised Wassenaar Arrangement, the voluntary framework that 42 countries, including the United States and European Union members, use to define genuinely sensitive dual use technology. Gisha’s research describes Israel’s own list as containing vague, expansive categories, such as “communications equipment” or “vehicles,” that sweep in enormous numbers of everyday civilian items.
The Gaza Chamber of Commerce and Industry has documented lighters specifically as an item that faced entry difficulties during the war, according to the Al Jazeera report on the current shortage. Whatever the precise justification, a component as simple as a butane lighter, containing a small metal flint wheel and a pressurised gas chamber, sits close enough to categories like flammable materials or precision mechanical parts that it can be swept into the same bureaucratic net as genuinely sensitive equipment.
Gisha’s broader research on the crossing system notes that even items with no plausible military application, including flashlights, generators and tent poles needed for basic shelter, have at times been blocked as supposedly falling under restricted categories that do not actually list them, according to a Freedom of Information request the organisation filed with Israeli authorities in 2024. The pattern that emerges is less about any single object and more about a system in which the burden of proof sits overwhelmingly on the population trying to receive ordinary goods, not on the authority restricting them.
Separately, the Gaza Chamber of Commerce reported in June 2026 that just over 30,000 trucks entered Gaza during the first five months of that year, an average of roughly 191 trucks a day, a volume still described as far below the territory’s basic prewar needs. When the total flow of goods into a territory of more than two million people is constrained at that level, low priority consumer items like lighters are among the first things squeezed out, even when they are never formally banned.
From Blockade to Barter: How Gaza Built an Economy Around Scarcity
What happens when an entire population cannot reliably replace a broken household item is not chaos. It is, somewhat counterintuitively, the birth of a new kind of market. Tamer Al Shawish’s roadside repair stall did not exist before the war because it did not need to. Cheap, disposable lighters made repair economically pointless. Once new units became scarce and expensive, the calculation flipped entirely, and a repair economy sprang up almost overnight to fill the gap.
This pattern has a long history in besieged and blockaded societies. During the four year siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, residents cut off from regular supplies of fuel, food and spare parts became, in the words of design writer Jonah Goodman documenting the period for Works That Work magazine, forced into constant improvisation simply to survive. Sarajevans built stoves from scrap metal, rigged water systems from salvaged pipe, and kept broken machinery running long past the point it would normally have been discarded. Decades later, some of those handmade objects are preserved in Sarajevo’s Historical Museum as physical evidence of how a population adapts when normal supply chains disappear.
Research from the Wilson Center on the Sarajevo siege economy, published as part of scholar Peter Andreas’s study Blue Helmets and Black Markets, found that scarcity during a siege does not simply suppress economic activity, it redirects it. Formal markets shrink while informal ones, built on barter, repair, smuggling and improvised manufacturing, expand to absorb the demand that official channels can no longer meet. In Bosnia, researchers studying the postwar economy estimated that the informal sector accounted for roughly 30 to 50 percent of official gross domestic product even years after the fighting ended, a legacy of survival habits formed under siege conditions.
Gaza’s lighter repair trade fits squarely inside this pattern. It is a rational, entrepreneurial response to an irrational supply environment. Al Shawish salvages parts from irreparable lighters to extend the life of others, effectively creating a miniature recycling economy around a single household object. The flint alone, a small striking component, now costs between 8 and 10 dollars to replace, according to Abu Shamlah’s account to Al Jazeera, turning what was once a disposable convenience into a repeatedly serviced piece of equipment.
None of this reflects a breakdown of economic reasoning among Gaza’s population. It reflects the opposite: a population applying sound economic logic, minimising waste, maximising the lifespan of scarce goods and creating new livelihoods, inside conditions imposed from outside that make normal consumption impossible.
The Deeper Fuel Crisis Sitting Behind the Lighter Shortage
A lighter is only useful if there is something worth lighting, and the reason so many Gaza households depend on lighters and open wood fires in the first place is a parallel, larger collapse in cooking gas supply. Iyad al Shorbaji, director general of Gaza’s Petroleum Authority, told a media forum organised by the Forum of Palestinian Journalists earlier in 2026 that the territory’s minimum monthly cooking gas needs stand at roughly 8,000 tons, or about 260 tons a day, while actual supply had fallen to no more than 20 percent of that figure even after some improvements.
Reporting by Al Jazeera in March 2026 found that Israeli authorities had allowed only 1,190 fuel trucks into Gaza out of 8,050 expected under the terms of the ceasefire that took effect in October 2025, a compliance rate of about 15 percent against an agreement that stipulated 50 fuel trucks a day. A separate Al Jazeera report from May 2026 described the gas distribution cycle for ordinary households stretching from once every six weeks before the shortage worsened to once every three months, forcing families back toward firewood, whose price has itself climbed as demand for it increases.
This is the structural reason fire, not gas, has become the backbone of cooking in Gaza, and why a functioning lighter carries so much weight. When a gas stove works, as Hasnaa Mansour put it, all you need is a small spark. A wood fire needs a sustained, reliable flame, patiently built and protected, which is far harder to produce with a failing lighter or none at all. The cooking gas shortage and the lighter shortage are not two separate stories. They are the same story, viewed from two different points along the same broken supply chain.
A Ceasefire on Paper, a Siege in Practice
The ceasefire agreement that took hold on 10 October 2025 was built around a commitment, announced as part of a wider 20 point plan, to lift the blockade on aid entering Gaza. Nearly a year later, the gap between that commitment and daily conditions on the ground remains stark. According to figures reported by the Gaza Government Media Office and cited by Al Jazeera, only 59,613 trucks entered Gaza between the ceasefire’s start and 19 July 2026, out of 168,000 that had been allocated under the agreement, a compliance rate of about 35 percent.
Human Rights Watch reported in May 2026 that when Israeli and American forces launched military operations against Iran in late February 2026, Israeli authorities closed all crossings into Gaza entirely for a period, and weekly truck volumes fell from an average of roughly 4,200 to just 590 before the Kerem Shalom crossing partially reopened under reported pressure from the United States. Kerem Shalom and the Zikim crossing remain the only two operating entry points for both humanitarian and commercial goods, a bottleneck that affects everything from flour to fuel to spare parts for lighters.
Not every account of the aid picture matches. Israeli officials and organisations such as the American Jewish Committee have pointed to data showing that staple food prices fell by roughly 72 percent between September 2025 and May 2026, and that more than 18,000 tons of medicine and medical supplies entered Gaza following the ceasefire, arguing that the core challenge has shifted from getting aid into Gaza to distributing it safely once inside. COGAT, the Israeli defence body responsible for coordinating aid, has published its own tracking data showing steep declines in the price of staples like flour, onions and lentils over the same period.
Both pictures can be true at once, and that is precisely the point. Bulk humanitarian tonnage and basic food prices can improve while an entire category of ordinary consumer goods, including lighters, remains squeezed by the same coordination requirements, crossing bottlenecks and dual use classifications that predate the ceasefire. A shipment of flour and a box of lighters do not move through the same approval pathway, and improvement in one does not guarantee improvement in the other. For a mother trying to light a fire before her children go to bed, the difference between a 35 percent truck compliance rate and a 72 percent drop in the price of onions is close to meaningless. What matters is whether she can produce a spark.
What Sarajevo’s Improvised Economy Reveals About Gaza’s Lighter Repairmen
Placing Gaza’s lighter shortage alongside Sarajevo’s siege economy is not an argument that the two conflicts are equivalent in scale, cause or political context. They are not. It is an argument that certain economic patterns recur wherever a population is cut off from normal trade for an extended period, regardless of the specific politics that caused the cutoff.
In both cases, scarcity did not simply reduce consumption, it reorganised the local economy around repair, substitution and barter. In both cases, new occupations emerged that had no reason to exist before the crisis, from Sarajevo’s improvised stove makers to Gaza’s lighter repairmen. In both cases, the informal economy that emerged during the crisis proved durable, with Bosnia’s postwar informal sector still estimated at 30 to 50 percent of official output nearly two decades after the siege ended, according to research examined by the Wilson Center.
There is also a psychological dimension that researchers who studied everyday life in besieged Sarajevo have documented, sometimes described as the effort to maintain an “imitation of life,” continuing ordinary rituals such as baking bread or brewing tea under conditions that make those rituals extraordinarily difficult. Rabab Deifallah’s insistence on baking bread for her children, and Hasnaa Mansour’s determination to keep her clay oven lit to sell food and support her family, sit inside that same tradition. The struggle to produce a simple spark is, in part, a struggle to preserve a version of normal domestic life that the surrounding conditions are working to erase.
The Economics of a Trapped Market: Why Prices for Everyday Goods Explode Under Siege
The jump from roughly 33 cents to as much as 33 dollars for a single lighter is not simple price gouging in the conventional sense. It is what economists would recognise as a textbook supply shock meeting an inelastic demand curve inside a market that cannot import its way out of the imbalance.
In an open market, a sudden shortage of lighters would trigger new supply almost immediately, since manufacturers or importers elsewhere would rush cheap replacement units in to capture the higher price. Gaza’s market cannot do that. Its border is controlled by a third party whose approval process determines what enters, at what volume and on what timeline, regardless of local price signals. That means the ordinary corrective mechanism of a free market, new supply chasing higher prices, is effectively disabled. Prices can rise almost without limit because the one thing that would normally bring them back down, more lighters entering the market, is not something local buyers or sellers control.
This is the same underlying mechanism that drove cooking gas cylinder prices in Gaza past 80 shekels during earlier blockade periods, and it explains the broader pattern documented across nearly two decades of Gaza’s crossing restrictions, from the “Red Lines” food policy Gisha’s legal campaign forced Israeli authorities to disclose in 2012, to the current classification disputes over items like flashlights, generators and tent poles. Whenever a controlled border sits between a population and its supply of a necessary good, prices for that good stop reflecting production costs and start reflecting the intensity of local desperation instead.
For families in Gaza, that dynamic converts a genuinely minor household object into a meaningful budget decision. Rabab Deifallah’s choice between repairing her lighter and buying flour is not an exaggeration for effect. It is an accurate description of what happens when a captive market meets extreme scarcity, a dynamic with real analogues in wartime rationing economies and long standing trade embargoes elsewhere in the world, where ordinary goods that would otherwise be trivially cheap become significant expenditures simply because supply cannot respond to demand.
What This Reveals Beyond Gaza
The lighter shortage is a small window into a much larger and more contested set of questions about how sieges and blockades are governed under international law, and who bears the burden of proving that a restriction is actually necessary. Gisha’s research argues that international humanitarian law places an obligation on the party controlling access to a territory to allow the entry of goods needed for the survival and dignity of the population, and that classifying an item as having potential military use does not automatically satisfy that obligation if the classification is applied too broadly or opaquely.
That debate is not unique to Gaza. Populations living under long running blockades or comprehensive sanctions regimes, from Cuba’s decades long experience under a United States trade embargo to various sanctioned states in more recent history, have repeatedly developed the same kinds of informal repair and substitution economies described here, because the underlying economic mechanism, a captive market cut off from normal supply, produces similar responses wherever it appears. Studying how those economies function offers useful lessons for humanitarian planners, aid organisations and policymakers trying to understand what actually determines a population’s wellbeing during prolonged closures, beyond headline statistics about total aid tonnage.
For businesses and entrepreneurs more broadly, Gaza’s lighter repair trade is also a clear, if extreme, illustration of a principle that applies far beyond conflict zones: whenever a supply chain for a previously disposable product breaks down, a repair and parts salvage market will tend to emerge to fill the gap, provided there is enough remaining value in the broken units to justify the labour. The same logic explains the growth of independent phone repair shops when component shortages hit consumer electronics, or the used auto parts trade during periods of new vehicle scarcity. Gaza’s version of that pattern simply operates under far more extreme constraints and far higher stakes.
The Object Test: What a Lighter Reveals About the Line Between Survival and Control
It would be easy to treat the story of a lighter shortage as a minor footnote inside a war defined by far larger losses, and in terms of scale, it is. But small objects often make abstract policy legible in a way that aggregate statistics cannot. A truck compliance rate of 35 percent is difficult to feel. A mother pressing a broken striker wheel again and again, weighing whether to spend her family’s remaining money on a spark or a bag of flour, is not.
The deeper lesson sitting inside Rabab Deifallah’s lighter is that control over a border is control over the texture of daily life on the other side of it, down to the smallest and most mundane objects. Whether a household can light a fire, bake bread or boil water for a child depends not only on food and fuel reaching Gaza in bulk, but on whether the specific small components of ordinary life, a flint, a valve, a lighter, are allowed to move as freely as the categories they get grouped into on a restricted goods list.
Gaza’s improvised repair trade shows that people will always find a way to keep a spark alive, salvaging what they can from what breaks. The harder, still unresolved question is whether the systems governing what reaches them will ever be judged not by the volume of aid recorded at a crossing, but by whether a mother two or three days without a fire can finally light one.
