His daughter, two others were crushed to death waiting in line to buy bread in central Gaza

Two girls and a woman were crushed to death waiting in a crowd of people outside a bakery in the central Gaza Strip Friday as Palestinians in the war-torn enclave face an increasing threat of famine amid a worsening food crisis. 

Osama Abu Al-Laban was with his 17-year-old daughter Rahaf in Deir el-Balah Friday, trying to find food to buy. 

He said his daughter, wanting to get a loaf of bread, asked him for money before she went to wait in a line of hundreds of people outside al-Banna bakery with her other sister. 

As she was taking the loaf of bread from her sister, he said she got swept into the crowd.

“[I don’t know] where she went, how she got out, how she got swept in,” said Abu Al-Laban wailing outside the hospital.

“All of a sudden, [people] got out carrying her. Someone get me to understand what happened here … how did this happen?”

He said his wife fell on the ground when she heard that her daughter suffocated to death.

Zeina Juha, 11, and Nisreen Fayyad, 50, were also crushed to death in the overcrowding and were taken to hospital where a doctor confirmed that they died from suffocation.

“This happens to us [over] a loaf of bread,” Abu Al-Laban said.

Hundreds cram outside bakery to get bread

A crowd of hundreds of Palestinians — children, men and women — crammed outside the bakery, with people shoving, screaming and some climbing a fence to get closer to the beginning of the line.

Umm Muhammad Fayyad was at the hospital to see her niece Nisreen one last time. She said her niece was trying to buy a loaf of bread to bring back home to her siblings.

“Isn’t this [wrong], isn’t this injustice? Three of them, not one,” Fayyad told CBC News.

The flow of food allowed into Gaza by Israel has fallen to nearly its lowest level in the almost 14-month-long war during the past two months, according to Israeli official figures. 

UN and aid officials say hunger and desperation are growing among Gaza’s population, almost all of which relies on humanitarian aid to survive.

Bakeries closed earlier due to flour shortage

Palestinians across the Gaza Strip are heavily relying on bakeries and charitable kitchens, with many able to only secure one meal a day for their families.

Some bakeries in Gaza were closed for several days last week due to a shortage of flour. 

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), said the ongoing Israeli offensive in the northern edge of Gaza for the past seven weeks has uprooted 130,000 people who have fled to the centre and north Gaza.

At least 40 Palestinians were killed in Israeli military strikes overnight and on Friday across the Gaza Strip, many of them in the Nuseirat refugee camp at the centre of the enclave, medics said, after Israeli tanks pulled back from parts of the camp.

More than 44,300 people have been killed and more than 104,000 wounded in the war, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Israel has destroyed much of the enclave’s infrastructure, forcing most of the 2.3 million population to move several times. The Palestinian civil emergency service estimates that the bodies of 10,000 people may be trapped under the rubble, which would take the reported death toll to more than 50,000.

Israel invaded the Gaza Strip last year following the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed an estimated 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities, and saw militants abduct more than 250 as hostages. An estimated 100 hostages remain in Gaza.