Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz ordered his troops on Thursday to "continue intensifying operations in Gaza," three days after Israel again attacked terrorist targets in Gaza.
"We are already seeing that military pressure is affecting Hamas's position. We will not stop until the hostages are released," Katz said during a meeting with Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir and other senior defense officials to assess the security situation.
Some relatives of the hostages oppose military pressure as a strategy to force Hamas to release the 59 hostages it still holds (35 of them dead, according to Israel), as they fear that their lives will be taken by the terrorist group.
Shortly before that, the Army also announced in a separate statement on Thursday that it had eliminated the head of Hamas's security forces, Rashid Jahjuh, who it said headed "a central covert unit within the terrorist group."
In the same note, he added that he also neutralized the head of the Jan Yunis sector (southern Gaza) of Hamas, Ayman Atsalih, and Ismail Abd al-Aal, who is defined as “a key terrorist in the Islamic Jihad arms smuggling unit.”