PALESTINIAN bakeries are rationing bread and humanitarian agencies have cancelled food handouts to Palestinian widows and orphans, giving warning of severe shortages in the Gaza Strip.

As Israel refuses to open Gaza’s only goods crossing, citing security concerns, Palestinians accuse it of imposing a blockade as punishment for Hamas’s election victory.

The victorious Islamist group prepared last night to name its Cabinet, with its first crisis looming in the shape of padlocked flour mills, a doubling of rice and sugar prices and shortages of fruit and milk.

US diplomats called a meeting last night to resolve the closure of Karni terminal, which remains under Israeli control. A UN report said that Karni had been closed for 46 days so far this year — 60 per cent of the time — compared with 18 per cent last year and 19 per cent in 2004. William Hart, of the World Food Programme (WFP), which feeds 160,000 of the poorest Palestinians, said: “The blockade has meant that the wheatflour mills in Gaza are unable to access the wheat they need to mill for the market, and for the WFP.”

At an empty storage depot in Gaza City, where the WFP administers its “hardship cases” programme through the Palestinian Authority, officials said that the flour ran out last month. Of 8,521 needy families in the area, more than 1,600 did not get their 50kg (110lb) sacks.

Jamil Hamoudi, a Palestinian civil servant at the depot, accused Israel of “collective punishment on all the Palestinian people for their democratic choice, although only 45 per cent of them voted for Hamas”.

But he and his colleagues fear that this and other aid projects — and their own jobs — will be under threat if the US and EU cut off aid delivered through a Hamas-controlled government. Mark Regev, an Israeli government spokesman, said that the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service and the army’s chief of staff presented evidence to yesterday’s Israeli Cabinet meeting of specific warnings about Palestinian threats to Karni: “We understand that there are very serious issues and we would like to have it open as soon as possible, but we cannot open it because of these direct threats.”

US officials have spent weeks searching for ways to bypass the Islamist group once it takes power. Tom Lantos, a Democrat congressman from California, tabled new legislation banning all aid to the Palestinian Authority except food, water and medicine.

Others have urged caution, saying that Palestinian misery will prompt attacks on Israel. James Wolfensohn, an envoy for the Quartet on the Middle East, last week pleaded with Congress not to impose “a draconian set of rules which ensures that the kids won’t be in school and you’ll have chaos in the streets”. He cautioned that if the West cuts all aid, 140,000 Palestinian Authority employees could be left without jobs. “I do not believe you can have a million starving Palestinians and have peace,” he said.

• Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister designate, named Mahmoud Zahar, 61, and Said Siam, 47, as part of his 24-strong Cabinet last night. They are expected to take the posts of foreign and interior minister respectively.

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