When Palestinians breached the border wall separating Gaza from Egyptian Sinai, one of the unintended outcomes was a testimony to the capitalist laws of supply and demand, and, even more unintended, to the fact that in times of economic crisis there develops a conflict between the innate desire of merchants to make the highest-possible profit with a popular expectation of the state to maintain a “moral economy”. Or, to put it in other words, the shops and markets of the North Sinai governorate, far removed from the main population centers on the Nile and counting only a little over 300,000 inhabitants, were not prepared for a sudden influx of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of Gazans trying to buy as much as possible before the border would be closed again, and thus prices skyrocketed. As residents and reporters on the ground observed, prices for basic commodities on average increased
