Vowing not to let the Gaza Strip become a 'second Lebanon', Israel warned on Sunday it will step up an offensive that has killed 22 people in three days in a bid to stop rocket fire and arms smuggling.
"Our policy is clear -- we will deploy all our efforts to prevent these firings and this contraband," senior defence ministry official Amos Gilad told army radio.
This will include "ground and air attacks on terrorists and their infrastructure," he added.
Israel says that militants in Gaza are amassing stockpiles of arms smuggled into the impoverished territory through tunnels from neighbouring Egypt.
"Hamas, which is reinforcing itself, constitutes a threat to Israel's security," Gilad said, referring to the Islamic militant movement which dominates the Palestinian government.
"Our priority is now to make it more and more difficult for the continuation of terrorism."
Defence Minister Amir Peretz already approved a first intensification of Israel's three-month-plus offensive in Gaza on Thursday after rocket fire from the territory hit his southern hometown of Sderot, wounding three people.
At least 22 Palestinians have since been killed and scores more wounded, as Israel pushed tanks and troops, backed by helicopters and drones, into more populated areas of the Gaza Strip.
In the most recent clashes, several dozen Israeli armoured vehicles and bulldozers, rolled two kilometres (more than a mile) into the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun Saturday evening, closing off its southern entrance.
But Peretz said Israel needed to take further action to prevent Hamas stockpiling weapons as Hizbullah did in Lebanon ahead of this summer's 34-day conflict.
"We've learned the lessons of Lebanon well," Israel's top-selling daily Yediot Aharonot quoted him as telling a closed-door meeting.
"We will operate against the armament immediately and we will not allow the terrorist organisations to become stronger. Israel is acting to prevent Hamas from joining the Iranian axis of evil."
Israel has not ruled out resuming control of the Gaza-Egypt border, the Palestinian territory's sole link with the outside world that bypasses the Jewish state.
The anti-smuggling efforts of the lightly armed Egyptian guards who currently patrol the border "could be significantly improved," Gilad said, although he refused to be drawn on any Israeli plans to replace them.
"We've learned from experience not to tackle such questions in public in order to preserve the element of surprise," he said.
Although the Israeli army insists that most of the 22 people killed since Thursday have been Palestinian militants, a 29-year-old woman was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers on Friday and three young children died in an air strike.
The army has said its offensive -- launched after the capture of a soldier in a deadly cross-border raid from Gaza in June -- is being conducted "against tunnels and other terror threats."
But a UN special envoy for human rights, John Dugard, has accused Israel of unleashing "collective punishment" in the territory, declaring last month that some 260 Palestinians had been killed and 800 wounded in the operation.
All told, 5,436 people -- most of them Palestinians -- have died since the Palestinian intifada resumed in 2000, according to an AFP count.