The Israeli army has stepped up its deadly strikes in the southern Gaza Strip in the fourth month of the war against Hamas, before the entry into this territory yesterday, Wednesday night, of medicines intended for the Israeli hostages and aid for the Palestinian civilians.

While the war creates fears of conflagration in the regionYemen’s Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for a new attack on an “American ship” off the coast of Yemen after being designated a “terrorist” entity by the United States.

According to Palestinian eyewitnesses, intense Israeli shelling targeted an area near Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis where, according to Israel, officials of the Islamist Palestinian movement Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, are hiding.

Calling it “the hardest and most intense night” of Israeli shelling in Khan Younis since the start of the war, Hamas announced the death of at least 81 Palestinians in the city, where the fighting is concentrated, and elsewhere in the Gaza Strip.

The Israelis “told us to go south, we went south, but there is no safe place in Gaza. Everything becomes a targety,” says Umm Mohammad Abu Odeh, who fled Beit Hanoun, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, to Rafah, in the southern part, on the border with Egypt.

The war, which has devastated Palestinian territory and displaced more than 80% of the population, was sparked by an unprecedented attack by Hamas on October 7 in southern Israel that killed 1,140 people, mostly civilians, the who were killed that day, according to an AFP tally from official figures.

About 250 people were taken hostage and taken to Gaza during the offensive, about a hundred of whom were released as part of a ceasefire in late November. According to Israel, 132 remain prisoners and 27 of them are said to have been killed.

In retaliation, Israel vowed to wipe out Hamas, which seized power in Gaza in 2007. According to Hamas’ health ministry, 24,448 people, the vast majority of them women, children and teenagers, have been killed during Israeli military operations in Palestinian territory, where the UN has spoken of a “threat of famine” and “deadly epidemics”.

“Worse than an earthquake”

According to the Israeli military, 193 soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the start of its ground offensive on October 27.

In central Gaza, Palestinians inspect the damage caused by fighting and shelling on Saladin Street.

“The (Israeli) occupation forces left behind an earthquake. It’s worse than an earthquake. There are still witnesses under the rubble and decomposing bodies,” says Aziz al-Musadar in front of destroyed apartment buildings.

The shelling has leveled entire neighborhoods, sparked a major humanitarian crisis and put more than half of the hospitals out of service in the Palestinian territory, which Israel has imposed a blockade on since 2007 and a full siege since October 9.

For six days there has been an almost complete blackout of Internet and telephone communications in this small territory of 362 square kilometers where about 2.4 million inhabitants live.

Symbolic birthday

On Tuesday, the Qatari mediator announced a deal between Israel and Hamas to bring in medicine for the hostages in exchange for aid for civilians in Gaza.

Convoys with medicine and humanitarian aid “entered Gaza,” Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Mazed al-Anhari wrote on Platform X, without specifying whether the medicine was delivered to the hostages.

At least a third of the hostages have chronic illnesses and need treatment, according to the hostage families’ collective Bring Them Home Now.

In Nir Oz, a kibbutz near Gaza, the collective organizes a symbolic birthday for the youngest hostage, Kfir Bibas, who was kidnapped when he was almost nine months old and whose birthday is today.

Hamas announced in November the death of a baby, his brother and his mother, who were killed, according to the organization, by an Israeli bombardment. Israel has not confirmed this.

Ten Palestinians were killed in the West Bank

In the West Bank, a Palestinian territory that has been under Israeli occupation since 1967, ten Palestinians were killed by Israeli army drone strikes and fighting in the districts of Nablus and Tulkarm, according to Palestinian sources.

The army, which since October 7 has intensified its operations in the West Bank, described one of the dead fighters as the leader of a “terrorist cell” which was “planning an imminent large-scale attack”.

The international community fears an extension of the conflict with daily exchanges of fire on the Lebanese-Israeli border between the Israeli army and Hezbollah and the proliferation of Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.

Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi has warned that the possibility of a war “within the next few months” on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon is “much higher” today.

The United States, after carrying out new strikes in Yemen against the Houthis, announced that it had designated the latter a “terrorist” entity.

The response of these rebels, who say they carry out their attacks “in solidarity” with the Palestinians, was not long in coming. Yesterday, Wednesday evening, they announced that they had targeted “an American ship” in the Gulf of Aden with missiles. It was not immediately known if this was the same attack that was announced earlier by the UK Maritime Safety Office (UKMTO) against a Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship.