Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon on Thursday evening warned the Hamas terrorist organization against attacking Israelis.

His comments came at a ceremony marking the end of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) in Kibbutz Yad Mordechai in southern Israel, and came amid a continued escalation in the region.

“Those who seek our destruction – both of citizens of Israel and Jews everywhere – must know even today that we will lay our hands on them, and they will not be safe, in any place around the world,” said Ya’alon.

“The terrorists not far from here, in the Gaza Strip, should know that if they try to interfere with our lives, they will be defeated,” the minister clarified. “We will not tolerate a return to a reality of rocket firing and attempts to harm civilians and soldiers. We will act firmly and with an iron hand, as we operated in the past day, against the terrorist organizations in Gaza, led by Hamas, which is responsible for the firing and for what is happening in Gaza.”

Ya’alon’s comments came after terrorists inside Gaza fired mortar shells at IDF forces on the Israeli side of the border, hours after the discovery of a Hamas terror tunnel into Israeli sovereign territory.

At least two mortar shells struck close to IDF soldiers, but no injuries were reported.

The incident followed a string of mortar attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli soldiers working to unearth a 30 meter-deep attack tunnel from southern Gaza on Wednesday.

Those attempts to stymie IDF engineers failed, however, and early Thursday afternoon it was announced that they had exposed the second terror tunnel from Gaza into Israel in a matter of weeks.