GAZA: The Zionist entity stepped up strikes Wednesday on war-torn Gaza’s south, where medicines were expected to be delivered for hostages in exchange for humanitarian aid under a newly brokered deal. But nearly 24 hours after the deal was announced, a top Hamas official set new conditions for providing the drugs, insisting the Zionist entity must not inspect the trucks carrying them.

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 percent of them women, young children and adolescents, have been killed in Zionist bombardments and ground assaults, according to the Gaza health ministry’s latest figures.

The agreement announced by Qatar on Tuesday following French and Qatari mediation will allow medicines to reach Zionist captives and aid to enter the besieged Palestinian territory. The International Committee of the Red Cross welcomed the deal, under which 45 captives are expected to receive medication, as “a much-needed moment of relief”.

A security source in Egypt said a Qatari plane carrying medicines had arrived on Wednesday at El-Arish near the Rafah border crossing with Gaza. France said the drugs would be sent to a hospital in Rafah, given to the Red Cross and divided into batches before being transferred to the hostages. A top Hamas official announced new conditions for the deal on Wednesday, however. Writing on X, formerly Twitter, Musa Abu Marzouk demanded 1,000 boxes of aid for Gaza for every one going to the captives and that a country Hamas trusts, not France, supply the medicine.

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 Zionist 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 Zionists “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. In Rafah, Safa Fethi Hamad has been anxiously waiting for more than a month to cross the border to Egypt. “We are all going to die. Food is very limited, we have no protection,” she told AFP.

Meanwhile, Zionist strikes killed nine people in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, emergency services and the army said, as violence in the territory sees no let-up. The Palestinian Red Crescent said a Zionist strike killed four people inside Tulkarem refugee camp early in the morning. “Palestine Red Crescent teams transport four martyrs from inside Tulkarem camp due to the occupation’s bombardment,” the group said in a statement.

An official at the camp confirmed the strike and the death toll. “The camp is besieged by aircraft and heavy numbers of the (Zionist) army and tanks,” Faisal Salama told AFP. Later on Wednesday, loud explosions were heard in the camp as thick smoke billowed into the sky amid sporadic gunfire, an AFP correspondent reported. The Zionist entity has occupied the West Bank since the Six-Day War of 1967 and its troops regularly carry out incursions into Palestinian communities.

A separate strike near Balata refugee camp, east of the city of Nablus, killed five fighters with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, it said in a statement. The group and the Zionist army said Ahmed Abdullah Abu Shalal, a Palestinian fighter, had been killed.

Camp resident Sajed Hazeem said he was awoken at dawn by a loud explosion. Minutes after the blast, an ambulance arrived at the scene but its access to the car was blocked by Zionist troops who arrived at the same time, Hazeem said. “The army pulled out the bodies and after about half an hour it withdrew,” he told AFP.

The Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah said the body of an “unidentified martyr killed by the occupation in a bombing of a vehicle” had been received by a hospital in Nablus. An AFP correspondent saw a pile of debris and the mangled remains of a car that was hit. Since the start of the Zionist-Hamas war in Gaza on Oct 7, the West Bank has experienced a level of violence not seen since the second Palestinian uprising, or intifada, between 2000 and 2005.

Zionist forces and attacks by settlers have killed at least 360 people in the territory, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Excluding annexed east Jerusalem, the territory is home to some three million Palestinians. They live alongside around 490,000 Zionists, who reside in settlements which are illegal under international law.