GAZA STRIP (AFP) – Israel stepped up strikes on the south of war-torn Gaza yesterday, ahead of the expected delivery of medicines for hostages in exchange for humanitarian aid under a newly brokered deal.
Air strikes and artillery fire targeted Khan Yunis throughout the night, said an AFP correspondent in the southern Gaza Strip’s biggest city.
“It was the most difficult and intense night in Khan Yunis since the start of the war,” said Gaza’s Hamas government, whose health ministry reported 81 deaths across the Palestinian territory.
At least 24,448 Palestinians, about 70 per cent of them women, young children and adolescents, have been killed in Israeli bombardments and ground assaults, according to the Gaza Health Ministry’s latest figures.
The agreement announced on Tuesday allowing medicines to reach the hostages and aid to enter the besieged Palestinian territory was brokered by Qatar and France.
Under the deal, “medicine along with other humanitarian aid is to be delivered to civilians in Gaza… in exchange for delivering medication needed for captives in Gaza”, Qatar’s foreign ministry said.
Ministry spokesman Majid Al-Ansari said the medicines and aid would leave Doha yesterday for the Egyptian city of El-Arish before being transported to Gaza.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed the deal, under which 45 hostages are expected to receive medication.
Once the drugs arrive at a hospital in the Gaza border town of Rafah, they are to be handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross, divided into batches and immediately transferred to the hostages, France said.
United States (US) National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said he was hopeful Qatar-brokered talks could lead to another such deal “soon”.
At the Abu Yussef Al-Najjar hospital in Rafah, Palestinians stood in front of bodies wrapped in shrouds, mourning the loss of loved ones killed in an overnight Israeli strike.
“Why are they doing this? They are destroying us,” Umm Muhammad Abu Odeh, a woman displaced from the north Gaza town of Beit Hanun, told AFP.
The Israelis “told us to go south, and we came here… but there is no safe place in Gaza, neither in the north, nor in the south, nor the middle. Everything is being struck. Everywhere is dangerous”.
The United Nations said the war has displaced roughly 85 per cent of Gaza’s 2.4 million people, many of whom have been forced to crowd into shelters and struggle to get food, water, fuel and medical care.
Yesterday the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said an Israeli strike killed four people in the city of Tulkarem, in the north of the Palestinian territory.
The Israeli army said separately it killed a top Palestinian leader in an air strike in the West Bank.
An AFP correspondent saw a pile of debris and mangled remains of a car that was hit in the strike near the Balata camp in the northern city of Nablus.
Israeli army raids and attacks by settlers have killed around 350 people in the territory, according to an AFP tally based on sources from both sides. Fears are mounting that the Israel-Hamas conflict will trigger an all-out war across the Middle East, with growing violence involving allies of the groups.
