Israel “still has work” in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu said, speaking at a graduation ceremony for officer cadets in southern Israel.

“If Hamas continues to flagrantly violate the ceasefire, it will suffer powerful attacks like those two days ago and yesterday,” he warned, adding: “We decide and act whenever necessary to remove immediate threats to our forces.” In this way, the Israeli prime minister responded to criticism that U.S. constraints led to insufficient reactions to Hamas’s deadly attacks on IDF troops.

“At the end of the day, Hamas will be disarmed and Gaza will be demilitarized… If foreign forces do it, that will be good. If they don’t, we will do it,” Netanyahu stressed.

In the same vein, the IDF chief of staff, Major General Eyal Zamir, warned that the army is ready to return to fighting on any front and will use “much greater force” than in the last two years of the war.

“We will show no patience toward any emerging threat. We will believe an enemy that declares its intention to harm us, and we will destroy it,” Zamir said at the same ceremony.

“There will be no tolerance when the security of Israeli citizens is threatened. That is a principle I intend to uphold. We operate in all arenas and now, with high readiness for any scale of operation required. In certain fields, we will act again with much greater force than in the past two years,” he added.