The Israeli army is again invading the Gaza Strip for the second night in a row. The operation, which is expected to be a prelude to an Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, was carried out by ground troops supported by fighter jets and drones in the Shuai area.

Their small ground incursion into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip served as an attack on the Islamist group’s strategic positions in the center of the Palestinian enclave, Israeli forces said.

Israel said it had hit “dozens” of Hamas targets, including anti-tank guns, the group’s operations center and other control centers. “The troops left the area at the end of the action,” the text states, stressing that there were no wounded among the Israeli ranks.

This is the second day in a row that the Israeli army has made a limited incursion into Gaza, although it has carried out similar incursions since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israeli soil that killed 1,400 people.

Twenty-four hours ago, Israeli tanks entered the northern part of the strip and destroyed Hamas infrastructure and tunnels in a limited raid that army spokesman Richard Hecht called on Thursday the largest to date.

The spokesman warned that such operations were a rehearsal for a major invasion of the territory in the future and that there would be more of them. He avoided using the word “invasion” to refer to these types of actions and preferred to call them “raids”.

Israel is preparing a major ground invasion of the Gaza Strip in response to the October 7 attack and has meanwhile been bombing the Gaza Strip daily, killing more than 7,000 Palestinians since the war began.