The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics publishes a monthly file of basic commodity prices in the Gaza Strip, 46 items long, of which 42 carry a stated average price from before 7 October 2023. Ranking those 42 by how far they have moved since produces an unusually clean sort, and it is not by category of goods. It is by how a thing gets into Gaza.

At the top are cigarettes. A packet of twenty L-M cost 21.69 shekels before the war and 506.90 in June — a rise of 2,237 per cent. Marlboro went from 24.72 to 508.62, up 1,957 per cent. Nothing else in the basket is within a factor of two of them.

Fuel follows. A litre of petrol has gone from 6.79 shekels to 106.32, up 1,466 per cent. Diesel has gone from 6.49 to 35.26, up 443 per cent. Drinking water delivered by tanker is up 492 per cent for a ten-cubic-metre load, 441 per cent at fifty and 365 per cent at 250, the discount for volume having survived everything else.

Then, out of order for a list otherwise sorted by scarcity, come vegetables: cucumbers up 538 per cent, bell peppers 503, chillies 418. These are not imported. They are grown in the strip, on land that has been fought over, with fuel at fifteen times its pre-war price for the pumps and the transport. Local production has been repriced like a smuggled good because that is effectively what it has become.

At the bottom of the same ranking sit the contents of a food parcel. A kilo of crushed red lentils cost 4.85 shekels before the war and 2.65 in June, 45 per cent less. Three litres of cooking oil are down one per cent, at 30.08 against 30.40. Ten kilos of white sugar are up 12 per cent, a kilo of rice 14 per cent, 400 grams of baby milk powder 21 per cent, tomato paste 23 per cent. A 12-kilo gas cylinder, which is imported but under the same permissions as aid, is up 56 per cent — a rise, but a twenty-sixth of what has happened to the diesel in the same category of use.

The pattern is corroborated outside this file. PCBS separately publishes a Gaza consumer price index broken down by category, compiled from a different collection, and the two move in near lockstep on the items that matter here: its imported-cigarettes index is up 2,210 per cent against the commodity file’s 2,237, its liquefied-hydrocarbons index is up 55.6 per cent against the gas cylinder’s 55.6, and its diesel series tracks the commodity file’s in 31 of 32 months.

Individual staples in the file should be handled more carefully than the spread. Several rows are carried forward rather than collected fresh: the 50-kilo flour series sat at exactly 0.911 times the Egyptian flour series for eighteen consecutive months, the rice row held a single value for seventeen, and canned beans jumped more than threefold in one month against a category index that moved 43 per cent. Read one line at a time, the file is unreliable in places. Read as a distribution — fuel and tobacco at one end, convoy staples at the other, with local produce sitting with the fuels — it holds, and it holds against a second, independently compiled source.