Alienated from the broader Internal Revenue Service culture and given little direction, specialists in a Cincinnati office struggled with the caseload of groups seeking tax exemptions.

If you were an I.R.S. agent, would you set aside requests for tax exemption any organization that had “tea party” in it’s title? What would you do if your boss told you to do so?

During the summer of 2010, the dozen or so accountants and tax agents of Group 7822 of the Internal Revenue Service office in Cincinnati got a directive from their manager. A growing number of organizations identifying themselves as part of the Tea Party had begun applying for tax exemptions, the manager said, advising the workers to be on the lookout for them and other groups planning to get involved in elections.

The specialists, hunched over laptops on the office’s fourth floor, rarely discussed politics, one former supervisor said. Low-level employees in what many in the I.R.S. consider a backwater, they processed thousands of applications a year, mostly from charities like private schools or hospitals.

For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words like “patriots,” “we the people” — as a way to search efficiently through the flood of applications for groups that might not qualify for exemptions, according to the I.R.S. inspector general. “Triage,” the agency’s acting chief described it.

As a grim-faced President Obama denounced the “inexcusable” actions of the I.R.S. last week and lawmakers of both parties lined up in Washington on Friday to accuse it of an array of misconduct, everything seemed so clear: the nation’s tax agency had deliberately targeted conservative activists, violating the public trust — and perhaps the law.

While there are still many gaps in the story of how the I.R.S. scandal happened, interviews with current and former employees and with lawyers who dealt with them, along with a review of I.R.S. documents, paint a more muddled picture of an understaffed Cincinnati outpost that was alienated from the broader I.R.S. culture and given little direction.

Overseen by a revolving cast of midlevel managers, stalled by miscommunication with I.R.S. lawyers and executives in Washington and confused about the rules they were enforcing, the Cincinnati specialists flagged virtually every application with Tea Party in its name. But their review went beyond conservative groups: more than 400 organizations came under scrutiny, including at least two dozen liberal-leaning ones and some that were seemingly apolitical.

Over three years, as the office struggled with a growing caseload of advocacy groups seeking tax exemptions, responsibility for the cases moved from one group of specialists to another, and the Determinations Unit, which handles all nonprofit applications, was reorganized. One batch of cases sat ignored for months. Few if any of the employees were experts on tax law, contributing to waves of questionnaires about groups’ political activity and donors that top officials acknowledge were improper.

“The I.R.S. is pretty dysfunctional to begin with, and this case brought all those dysfunctions to their worst,” said Paul Streckfus, a former I.R.S. employee who runs a newsletter devoted to tax-exempt organizations. “People were coming and going, asking for advice and not getting it, and sometimes forgetting the cases existed.”

Who gets the blame and how far it goes are questions already consuming Washington. Two top I.R.S. officials have resigned, including the acting commissioner, Steven Miller. The Justice Department has begun an investigation into potential civil rights and criminal violations by the I.R.S. This week, a House committee will seek to depose five I.R.S. employees, including a midlevel executive in Washington and a Cincinnati specialist said to have handled the cases in the spring and summer of 2010.

“I think that what happened here was that foolish mistakes were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection,” Mr. Miller testified before a House committee Friday. While “intolerable,” he said, it “was not an act of partisanship.”

As a storm of criticism washes over what is — even in the best of times — the federal government’s most reviled agency, some of those in Cincinnati agreed.

“I don’t believe there’s any such thing as rogue agents — there are some that aren’t as competent as others, just like in any workplace,” said Bonnie Esrig, a senior manager in the I.R.S. office who retired in January, in part over disagreements with other officials there.

“I was not a happy camper leaving that organization,” she added, “and I can still say that I don’t think there was malice behind it at all.”

Administering the nearly four-million-word federal tax code involves so many arcane legalities, and is so fraught with potential to ignite Washington’s partisan skirmishes or infuriate taxpayers, that much of the I.R.S. is run by lawyers.

But the Exempt Organizations Division — concentrated in Cincinnati with fewer than 200 workers, according to I.R.S. officials — is staffed mostly with accountants, clerks and civil servants. Working for one of only three I.R.S. divisions not charged with collecting tax revenue, specialists in the Determinations Unit in Cincinnati primarily review and process roughly 70,000 applications for exemptions each year, relatively few from groups engaged in election activity.

Inside the agency, the unit was considered particularly unglamorous. “Nobody wants to be a determination agent,” said Jack Reilly, a former lawyer in the Washington office that oversaw exempt organizations. “It’s a job that just about everybody would be anxious to get out of it.”

Flood of Applications

In recent years, the office’s biggest headache was not the rising tide of political groups seeking tax exemptions or the growing calls from Washington lawmakers, chiefly Democrats, demanding closer scrutiny of big-spending political operations claiming tax-exempt status. The office was consumed with a different problem: a tweak Congress had made to the tax code that threatened more than 400,000 nonprofit groups around the country with an automatic loss of tax exemption, potentially putting some out of business, according to a report by the Taxpayer Advocate Service, which handles complaints about tax cases. Tens of thousands of such groups had reapplied for exemptions, overwhelming the office with queries and paperwork.

The rules governing those traditional charities, known as 501(c)3 groups, are relatively clear. But after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision on campaign financing freed corporations and unions to spend money on elections, hundreds of new applications began to arrive from Tea Party and other organizations. Most sought a different status, 501(c)4, under which “social welfare” nonprofit groups may engage in a limited amount of election activity without registering as political action committees and disclosing their donors.

Those indicating that they will intervene in elections typically receive closer scrutiny, former I.R.S. officials said, because of the potential that they may not be entitled to a tax exemption.

It is not unusual for I.R.S. specialists to search for patterns in applications, in part for clues toward fraud and scams — a single tax preparer employing the same tax gambit for multiple clients, for example — and in part to ensure that similar groups are treated in a consistent way, the former officials said.

It is not yet clear which manager in Cincinnati asked for an initial keyword search of Tea Party applications, Congressional aides said. One of the employees that the House committee is seeking to interview this week, Joseph Herr, had been a manager in charge of the group of specialists in Cincinnati from its inception through August 2010, according to the aides.

By October 2010, a batch of 40 cases were under heightened review, 18 of them with “Tea Party” in the group names. Specialists throughout the Determinations Unit had been issued a “Be on the Lookout” notice for Tea Party applications, and some were given training on how to evaluate groups planning to do election-related work, according to the I.R.S. inspector general.

In October 2010, as part of a reorganization of the unit, responsibility for the cases was shifted to a different group of specialists. Some applications that had been farmed out to Determinations Unit specialists elsewhere were moved back to the Cincinnati office.

One manager there complained that the “technical unit” — lawyers, chiefly in Washington, who advise the specialists on the tax law — had been slow in providing guidance on the applications, according to the inspector general. Over the next several months, the inspector general said, low-level specialists, managers and the lawyers appeared to struggle to come up with a consistent set of criteria and questions to ask the groups.

Philip Hackney, who was an I.R.S. lawyer in Washington, occasionally reviewed the exempt unit’s work until 2011 and was not involved in the Tea Party cases. He said that several times he and other lawyers revised the procedures the Cincinnati employees devised to scrutinize applicants because their questions might be interpreted as intrusive or politically insensitive.

“We’re talking about an office overwhelmed by 60,000 paper applications trying to find efficient means of dealing with that,” said Mr. Hackney, who is now a law professor at Louisiana State University. “There were times where they came up with shortcuts that were efficient but didn’t take into consideration the public perception.”

As the review process slowed to a crawl, groups whose applications were hung up in I.R.S. purgatory pressed for any information they could glean from the specialists handling their cases. Occasionally they got glimpses of what was unfolding behind the scenes.

The Shenandoah Valley Tea Party Patriots, a small group in Virginia, applied for 501(c)4 status in the spring of 2010. The organization’s application was assigned to Elizabeth Hofacre, who appears to have handled many of the initial applications flagged for review.

Frustrated by the slow pace, Mark Daugherty, the group’s treasurer at the time, called the Cincinnati office in February 2011. He said in an interview that he was directed not to Ms. Hofacre but to a different I.R.S. employee, who told Mr. Daugherty that he had a “stack of Tea Party applications” on his desk and that they were getting special scrutiny because they represented a “new type of animal.”

Tom Clifton, the treasurer of the Mid-South Tea Party in Memphis, said he called the I.R.S. repeatedly over the year and a half it took for his group to win approval of its tax-exempt status. Every time, he said, the agency employees he talked to alluded to how they were “overrun with applications” or told him, “You don’t have any idea how much we have to do here.”

“Most of the time, I would ask, ‘Well, if that’s the case, why do you have to have so much information that doesn’t seem pertinent?’ ” Mr. Clifton said, referring to several rounds of follow-up questions he received. “None of them could ever answer that.”

Washington Intervention

In July 2011, Lois Lerner, the director of the Exempt Organizations Division in Washington, held a briefing with employees involved with the review. She learned just how far off track the Cincinnati office had gone: specialists had been told to flag not only Tea Party groups, but applications describing particular policy views, like opposition to federal spending, that tend to be espoused by conservative groups. In all, more than 100 applications had been flagged. Almost none had been approved.

Ms. Lerner insisted that the specialists broaden their criteria to flag any group that had suggested plans for lobbying or political activity, according to the inspector general. But a few months later, in November, according to the inspector general, a midlevel official in Washington temporarily overseeing the Cincinnati office told a supervisor there that the guidance was “too lawyerly.” The guidelines were revised several times, as new specialists and lawyers joined the effort.

By January 2012, employees in Cincinnati, apparently without consulting senior officials, chose new keywords, including “educating on the Constitution” and “social economic reform/movement.” That month, the specialists in Cincinnati and elsewhere began sending out increasingly exhaustive, sometimes intrusive questionnaires.

More than 20 months after applying to the I.R.S., the Shenandoah Valley Tea Party Patriots received its first follow-up letter. Signed by Mitch Steele, another specialist in Cincinnati, it listed 38 questions, including requests for copies of all of the group’s newsletters, a résumé for each of the group’s officers and the names of any officer who had plans to run for public office.

Marcus Owens, who served as the director of the Exempt Organizations Division until 2000 and is now a private tax lawyer, said he believed that the specialists were trying to develop a single, long survey that could be sent to many kinds of groups.

“There was an effort at standardization of questions,” Mr. Owens said. “So they might have made the list longer in an effort to have a one-size-fits-all questionnaire so they could just send it out the door.”

Not all conservative groups that got special scrutiny received follow-up requests for additional information. But some liberal groups did: Progress Texas, part of a national network of liberal advocacy groups, ProgressNow, received a follow-up questionnaire from the I.R.S. in February 2012, similar to the ones many Tea Party groups received, containing 21 questions. It took 479 days for Progress Texas to be approved, officials there said.

The inspector general would determine that I.R.S. agents asked 170 applicants for additional information, with 98 asked at least some questions that were unnecessary. Donor lists — a particularly sensitive topic because they do not have to be disclosed to the public — were requested from 27 groups, 13 of them with Tea Party names, according to the inspector general.

The intrusive questions prompted many of the Tea Party groups to complain that they had been targeted by the I.R.S. in an election year. Ms. Lerner ordered the Cincinnati unit to stop issuing new requests for more information, while other managers sought to retract some requests for donor information and grant extensions for answering questionnaires to other groups caught in the net. In Washington, word of the problems began to percolate through the upper ranks of the I.R.S., though exactly how much was known — and by whom — is not yet clear.

Headway on Approvals

By last May, the bureaucratic machinery in Cincinnati had finally begun to chug into motion: after issuing no approvals for months to any organization that had been flagged for special scrutiny because of political activity, the I.R.S. issued a handful that month and then nearly 40 in June, many of them to Tea Party groups, according to public agency records.

But by then, the controversy had spread well beyond Cincinnati. Republican lawmakers demanded answers from Douglas H. Shulman, the I.R.S. commissioner at the time, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. He said he was unaware that any conservative groups had been targeted — a statement sure to figure in questioning when he testifies on the Hill this week.

Another year would pass before the agency publicly acknowledged a systemic problem, and then only at a conference of tax lawyers at which Ms. Lerner answered a question about the reviews. On Friday, it emerged that she had planted the question with an audience member.

Some former agency officials and outside advocates said they worried about the chilling effect the controversy could have on legitimate enforcement. Even as the agency was scrutinizing small nonprofit organizations, critics say, it appears to have done little to crack down on large 501(c)4 groups that spent at least half a billion dollars on political advertising during the last four years, some in seeming defiance of the I.R.S. rules. Efforts by the agency to clarify those tax rules — a potential first step toward curbing abuses — began last summer but are still in the early stages.

Mr. Hackney, the former I.R.S. lawyer, said he was disappointed that the agency had not had better management to prevent the missteps, particularly the delays. But he said he feared that the politically charged investigation might descend into a witch hunt that leaves low-level I.R.S. employees too intimidated to enforce the tax code.

“It would be tragic to see the I.R.S. be debilitated by this,” he said. “Its work is too important.”

Outside the Cincinnati office on Thursday, employees on smoking breaks voiced many complaints. Pay freezes, mandatory furloughs and the effects of sequestration were all testing their already low morale. But the scandal, some said, had made things worse.

“There’s a buzz in the office about this Tea Party situation,” said Neal Juarez, a case advocate in the Taxpayer Advocate Service. Like several other I.R.S. workers, Mr. Juarez was skeptical that employees in Cincinnati would have acted as they had without some direction from leadership in Washington.

“You know what they say when there’s trouble,” he added. “You know what rolls downhill.”

Ernst & Young found that 20 percent of corporate officials and employees knew of financial manipulation within their company in the last year.

If you were doing international business, what would you do if you if you found out that your facility in Africa lied by under-reporting costs and over-reporting revenues on its financial statements, and this was a rather common tradition in that nation?

CORRUPTION is a growth business.

Bribery scandals have dominated headlines in several countries in recent months, among them India and Nigeria. International enforcement of antibribery laws has been increasing in the United States and major European countries.

A new survey of corporate officials and employees in 36 countries — in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, as well as India — indicates that there is plenty of corruption that needs investigating.

Over all, 20 percent of the respondents said they knew of incidents at their own companies within the previous year that could be construed as cooking the books — moves to either understate expenses or overstate revenue. Among senior managers and directors, the figure was 42 percent.

The survey was conducted late last year by Ipsos, a market research firm, on behalf of Ernst & Young, a major accounting firm.

Ernst did not break down responses to the cooking-the-books question by country, but indicated that managers from emerging markets were more likely to say that had happened than were managers from more developed economies.

The firm did provide country-by-country results for some questions, as can be seen in the accompanying charts. Asked if companies in their countries “often report their financial performance as better than it is,” more than half the respondents in nine countries — Nigeria, Slovenia, Russia, Spain, Croatia, India, Serbia, Kenya and Austria — said that they did.

At the other end of the scale, fewer than a quarter of respondents in eight countries — Finland, Norway, Switzerland, France, Romania, Sweden, Hungary and the Netherlands — said that happened.

The survey was commissioned by Ernst’s fraud investigation and dispute services group, which does not perform standard corporate audits but instead is hired by companies to look for signs of corruption or fraud in their own operations. It did not include either China or the United States.

David Stulb, the global leader of that group, said it was growing in part because many companies were worried about enforcement of the American Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars the bribing of foreign officials, and of similar laws in other developed countries. Those surveyed included employees and officials of overseas subsidiaries of multinational companies. The respondents were promised anonymity, Ernst said.

The survey revealed what Ernst called a “corruption perception gap” in many countries, where respondents said bribery and corrupt practices were far more common in other parts of their country than they were in their own industry. At the extreme, 94 percent of respondents in Kenya thought corruption was widespread in the country, but only 34 percent thought it was a problem in their own industry.

The responses indicated that corruption and bribery are rare in the Scandinavian countries, but common in some Southern and Eastern European countries, as well as in India, the Middle East and Africa.

Foxconn Technology has made progress toward better safety conditions, but employees are still working longer than Chinese law allows.

Chinese law limits employees to working 49 hours yet factory workers at Apple supplier Foxconn had been working 60 and are still not down to 49. If you were an Apple executive, would you change suppliers if Foxconn doesn’t abide my Chinese law, a law that other Chinese suppliers violate?

Foxconn Technology, the company that manufactures Apple’s popular iPads and iPhones, has made substantial progress toward improving safety and other working conditions at three of its Chinese plants dedicated to making Apple products. But it has not yet achieved the most difficult goal: reducing the average workweek to the maximum allowed by Chinese law, a global monitoring group said on Thursday.

The auditors, supervised by the Fair Labor Association, said Foxconn was still working toward lowering the average workweek to the 49-hour cap. And labor unions at the plants that are supposed to represent the workers’ interests are still dominated by management, the group said.

Still, the average workweek has come down sharply from the typical 60 hours or more that has been common practice at the Chinese suppliers of Apple and other technology companies.

Although the auditors declined to be specific about the length of the Foxconn workweek, Apple has said that it has been working to reduce the long hours put in by workers at its suppliers, which are mostly in China.

In a statement on its supplier responsibility Web site, the company said for more than a million workers in its global supply network that it tracked in 2012, “the average hours worked per week was under 50.”

An Apple spokesman, Steve Dowling, declined to discuss the specifics of the Fair Labor Association audit, which he said was done independently of Apple. In a statement, Foxconn said the F.L.A. report confirmed the company’s recent improvements in its operations. “We will continue to build on that success as we work toward compliance with the F.L.A. Code,” the company said.

But Mr. Dowling said Apple has been working closely with its suppliers and conducting its own monitoring to improve conditions at the factories that make its products, and the company has posted public progress reports.

Foxconn, part of the Taiwan-based company Hon Hai Precision Industry, employs about 178,000 workers at the three factories inspected. It has about 1.2 million workers at plants making products for Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft and other technology companies.

Foxconn has been under intense scrutiny for several years because of working conditions inside its factories. Investigations by The New York Times, outside groups and Apple’s own supplier responsibility officials have found illegal amounts of overtime, crowded working conditions, under-age workers and improper disposal of hazardous waste. Industrial accidents have injured and killed Foxconn workers, and the company also experienced a wave of worker suicides.

Labor and consumer activists have pressured Apple, one of the most profitable companies in the world, to do more to improve conditions for the people who make its products. The monthly earnings of Foxconn workers making Apple products are currently about $500.

Apple joined the Fair Labor Association, or F.L.A., in January 2012, and asked the group to audit its suppliers, beginning with Foxconn. The labor group has periodically inspected Foxconn factories in Guanlan, Longhua and Chengdu since February 2012 and interviewed thousands of workers. Apple pays for the audits.

After the first inspection, Apple and Foxconn agreed to an action plan of 360 items to be completed by July 1, 2013. As of January, 98.3 percent of them had been achieved, the group’s report said.

Most of the items were “housekeeping issues,” said Auret van Heerden, chief executive of the F.L.A., in an interview Thursday. “Those things they plowed through.”

But Foxconn has also addressed more substantive problems, Mr. van Heerden said. For example, in fire safety, the company added more escape routes and cleared choke points after the auditors asked it to test the evacuation of buildings during shift change, when plants are most crowded. “We were, in a way, looking for trouble,” he said.

He noted that Foxconn has also overhauled many processes, including using robots instead of people to polish the aluminum backs of iPad cases and water to capture and dispose of the resulting dust. An aluminum dust explosion in May 2011 at Foxconn’s Chengdu factory killed three workers and injured more than a dozen others.

Critics of the F.L.A. and Foxconn said the most recent audit played down problems found by other investigators, such as unpaid overtime and Foxconn’s use of unpaid interns.

“Over all, the F.L.A.’s reporting on Foxconn continues to be unjustifiably rosy,” Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, a university-backed group that monitors apparel factories worldwide, said in an e-mail.

Palestinians in Gaza who crave KFC meals must order from across the border in Egypt, and the food-delivery odyssey involves two taxis, a checkpoint and a smuggling tunnel.

If you were a Kentucky Fried Chicken executive, would you authorize a franchise in the Palestinian Gaza Strip which is being blockaded by Israel?

The French fries arrive soggy, the chicken having long since lost its crunch. A 12-piece bucket goes for about $27 here — more than twice the $11.50 it costs just across the border in Egypt.

And for fast-food delivery, it is anything but fast: it took more than four hours for the KFC meals to arrive here on a recent afternoon from the franchise where they were cooked in El Arish, Egypt, a journey that involved two taxis, an international border, a smuggling tunnel and a young entrepreneur coordinating it all from a small shop here called Yamama — Arabic for pigeon.

“It’s our right to enjoy that taste the other people all over the world enjoy,” said the entrepreneur, Khalil Efrangi, 31, who started Yamama a few years ago with a fleet of motorbikes ferrying food from Gaza restaurants, the first such delivery service here.

There are no name-brand fast-food franchises on this 140-square-mile coastal strip of 1.7 million Palestinians, where the entry and exit of goods and people remain restricted and the unemployment rate is about 32 percent. Passage into Egypt through the Rafah crossing is limited to about 800 people a day, with men 16 to 40 years old requiring special clearance. Traveling through the Erez crossing into Israel requires a permit and is generally allowed only for medical patients, businessmen and employees of international organizations.

Palestinians generally refer to Gaza as being under siege or blockade by Israel, and isolation from the world is among the most common complaints of people here. That can create an intense longing for what those outside Gaza see as mundane, or ordinary.

“The irregular circumstances in Gaza generate an irregular way of thinking,” explained Fadel Abu Heen, a professor of psychology at Al Aqsa University in Gaza City. “They think of anything that is just behind the border, exactly as the prisoner is thinking of anything beyond the bars.”

Professor Abu Heen noted that when Hamas, the militant Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, breached the border with Egypt in 2008, during the height of the Israeli siege, thousands of Gazans flooded into El Arish and bought not just medicine and food staples but cigarettes, candy and things they did not need — just to show they had managed to bring something back from outside. Breaking the blockade, then and now, is seen as part of resisting the Israeli enemy, giving a sense of empowerment and control to people here, even if it comes in the form of fried chicken.

Even as Israel has relaxed restrictions on imports over the past few years, hundreds of illegal tunnels have flourished in Rafah. Weapons and people are smuggled underground, but so are luxury cars, construction materials and consumer goods like iPads and iPhones. And now: KFC.

Formerly called Kentucky Fried Chicken, a KFC franchise opened in El Arish, just over Gaza’s southern border, in 2011, and in the West Bank city of Ramallah last year. That, along with ubiquitous television advertisements for KFC and other fast-food favorites, has given Gazans a hankering for Colonel Sanders’s secret recipe.

So after Mr. Efrangi brought some KFC back from El Arish for friends last month, he was flooded with requests. A new business was born.

“I accepted this challenge to prove that Gazans can be resilient despite the restrictions,” Mr. Efrangi said.

In the past few weeks, Mr. Efrangi has coordinated four deliveries totaling about 100 meals, making about $6 per meal in profit. He promotes the service on Yamama’s Facebook page, and whenever there is a critical mass of orders — usually 30 — he starts a complicated process of telephone calls, wire transfers and coordination with the Hamas government to get the chicken from there to here.

The other day, after Mr. Efrangi called in 15 orders and wired the payment to the restaurant in El Arish, an Egyptian taxi driver picked up the food. On the other side of the border, meanwhile, Ramzi al-Nabih, a Palestinian cabdriver, arrived at the Hamas checkpoint in Rafah, where the guards recognized him as “the Kentucky guy.”

From the checkpoint, Mr. Nabih, 26, called his Egyptian counterpart and told him which of the scores of tunnels the Hamas official had cleared for the food delivery. He first waited near the shaft of the tunnel, but after a while he was lowered on a lift about 30 feet underground and walked halfway down the 650-foot path to meet two Egyptian boys who were pushing the boxes and buckets of food, wrapped in plastic, on a cart.

Mr. Nabih gave the boys about $16.50, and argued with them for a few minutes over a tip. A half-hour later, the food was loaded into the trunk and on the back seat of his Hyundai taxi, bound for Gaza City.

Back at Yamama, Mr. Efrangi sorted the meals for his motorcyclists to deliver to customers’ doorsteps. He said he limited the menu to chicken pieces, fries, coleslaw and apple pie because other items could be too complicated.

“Some clients would need a sandwich without mayonnaise, or a more spicy one, or a sandwich with or without sauce,” he said. “That’s why we do not bring everything, to avoid delivering the wrong order.”

Ibrahim el-Ajla, 29, who works for Gaza’s water utility and was among those enjoying KFC here the other day, acknowledged that the food was better hot and fresh in the restaurant, but he said he would be likely to order again. “I tried it in America and in Egypt, and I miss the taste,” he said. “Despite the blockade, KFC made it to my home.”

Mr. Efrangi may not have the fast-food market to himself much longer. A Gaza businessman who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Abu Ali,to avoid tipping off his competitors, said he applied for a franchise from KFC’s Middle East dealer, Americana Group, two months ago. Adeeb al-Bakri, who owns four KFC and Pizza Hut franchises in the West Bank, said he had been authorized to open a restaurant in Gaza and was working out the details.

“We need to get approval to bring chicken from Gaza farms with the KFC standards, we need to make sure that frying machines would be allowed in, we need the KFC experts to be able to head for Gaza for regular monthly checkups,” Mr. Bakri said. “I do not have a magic stick to open in Gaza quickly.”

Mr. Bakri was unaware of Mr. Efrangi’s delivery service, and when told the details, he frowned at the four-hour odyssey from oven to table.

“We dump it after half an hour,” he said.