Israel’s internal security minister, Itamar Ben-Dvir, chairman of the Jewish Power party and a key government coalition member, has expressed frustration with the failure of Israel to achieve a decisive victory over Hamas: “The time for a decision has come. We must stop talking in the language of deals but in the language of decisions.”

“Hamas was not deterred on the seventh of October, and still, after 73 days of fighting, it is not decided. When you want to make a decision, you don’t transfer money to any official, and it doesn’t matter if it’s an official from the authority or a body bag, even if it’s an official from UNRWA. When you want to decide, you don’t pause. And we do not allow our enemies to set shocking conditions for the release of the kidnapped.”

Every day it is allowed to publish another one of our heroes who was killed in Gaza, instead of publishing that thousands of terrorists were killed in Gaza. There is no free hand to implement the death penalty law for terrorists, which would have allowed us to make a simple comparison: every day that abductees do not return – more [Hamas terrorists] are executed.

Directing his criticism at Israel’s war cabinet members, headed by PM Benjamin Netanyahu, he said: “They shoot rockets from the humanitarian evacuation areas, they shoot at our soldiers, and we continue with humanitarian measures and humanitarian gestures, the time of decision has come.”