Official sources reported that aid for civilians in Gaza and medicine for Israeli hostages entered Gaza this Wednesday under the agreement negotiated by Qatar.
“In the last few hours, medicines and supplies have arrived in the Gaza Strip, in application of the agreement announced yesterday in favor of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, including the hostages,” Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al Ansari said on his official X (formerly Twitter) account.
“Qatar, together with its regional and international partners, continues its mediation efforts at the political and humanitarian levels,” he concluded in his short message with a picture of the two planes that arrived in Al Arish (Egypt) later in the day.)
The Islamist group Hamas said on Wednesday that out of a thousand boxes of medicine entering the Gaza Strip, one was intended for the hostagesas part of an agreement reached with Israel through the mediation of Qatar and France.
“For every box of medicine for the prisoners, a thousand for our people,” Musa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas political bureau official who lives in Lebanon, said in a publication on X about the terms of the agreement.
The Hamas leader added that the shipment contained 140 different types of medicine.
The drugs are supplied by the International Committee of the USA The Red Cross will distribute both those intended for the hostages and those intended for the Gaza population to four hospitals across the Gaza Strip, the Hamas leader said.
So far, the Red Cross has not had access to the hostages to check their health and detention conditions, which has been heavily criticized by the families and the Israeli government; However, the organization claims that the security conditions for this are not guaranteed.
This is the first agreement between the warring parties since a week-long ceasefire in November that allowed the release of 105 hostages for 240 Palestinian prisoners, an exchange backed by the Red Cross.
It is estimated that 136 hostages remain in the Gaza Strip -27 of them are dead – and 75% of them require medical treatment, either because they have chronic illnesses or because they are injured.