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

Two girls and a woman were crushed to death as they waited in a crowd outside a bakery in the central Gaza Strip on Friday as Palestinians in the war-torn region faced the threat of starvation amid a food crisis.

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

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

As he took the bread from his sister, he swept into the crowd.

“[I don’t know] where did he go, how did he come out, how did he come in,” said Abu Al-Laban crying outside the hospital.

“Suddenly, [people] go out and carry him. Can someone make me understand what happened here… how did this happen?”

He said that his wife fell to the ground when she heard that her daughter was gasping for air until she died.

Zeina Juha, 11, and Nisreen Fayyad, 50, were also trampled to death in this traffic and rushed to the hospital where the doctor confirmed that they died due to constipation.

“This is happening to us [over] bread,” said Abu Al-Laban.

Hundreds crowded outside the bakery to get bread

A crowd of hundreds of Palestinians – children, men and women – huddled outside the bakery, people shuffling, shouting and some climbing the fence to get to the start of the line.

Umm Muhammad Fayyad was in the hospital to see her niece Nisreen for the last time. He said his nephew was trying to buy bread to bring home to his siblings.

“It’s not like that [wrong]Isn’t this unfair? Three of them, not one,” Fayyad told CBC News.

The flow of food allowed into Gaza by Israel dropped to almost the lowest level in the 14-month war during the past two months, according to official Israeli statistics.

UN and aid officials say hunger and desperation are growing among Gazans, almost all of whom rely on humanitarian aid to survive.

Bakeries closed early due to a lack of flour

Palestinians on the other side of the Gaza Strip rely heavily on bakeries and soup kitchens, and many are only able to secure one meal a day for their families.

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

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Palestinian Relief Agency (UNRWA), said that the ongoing Israeli offensive on the northern outskirts of Gaza for the past seven weeks has displaced 130,000 people from central and northern Gaza.

At least 40 Palestinians were killed in Israeli military strikes overnight and on Friday across the Gaza Strip, mostly in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the center of the camp, medics said, after Israeli tanks retreated from parts of the camp.

More than 44,300 people have been killed and more than 104,000 injured in the war, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Israel has destroyed the enclave’s infrastructure, forcing most of its 2.3 million people to relocate multiple times. Palestinian emergency officials estimate that the bodies of 10,000 people may be trapped under the rubble, bringing the death toll to more than 50,000.

Israel invaded the Gaza Strip last year following an attack led by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, which killed an estimated 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities, and saw more than 250 hostages taken. There are approximately 100 hostages remaining in Gaza.