Israel escalates Gaza strikes after medicine-for-aid deal
Israel stepped up strikes Wednesday on Gaza’s south, where medicines were expected to be delivered for hostages in exchange for humanitarian aid under a newly brokered deal.
Air strikes and artillery fire targeted Khan Yunis throughout the night.
“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, AFP reported.
Fighting has ravaged Gaza since Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attacks on Israel that resulted in the death of about 1,140 people.
At least 24,448 Palestinians, about 70 percent 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.
Hamas and other resistance groups seized about 250 captives during the October 7 attacks, and around 132 remain in Gaza, including at least 27 believed to have been killed. The fate of those still in captivity has gripped Israeli society, while a broader humanitarian crisis in Gaza marked by the threat of famine and disease has fueled international calls for a cease-fire.
The agreement announced by Qatar on Tuesday following French and Qatari mediation will allow medicines to reach the hostages and aid to enter the besieged Palestinian territory.
The International Committee of the Red Cross welcomed the deal, under which 45 hostages are expected to receive medication, as “a much-needed moment of relief”.
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”.
The United Nations says the war has displaced roughly 85 percent 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.