BEIT-UL-MOQADDAS (AFP) -- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed on Sunday to continue military operations in the Gaza Strip targeting Palestinian resistance fighters in the Hamas-ruled territory.

""I'd like to express my appreciation to the army's and the defense establishment's unrelenting operations aimed at getting the terrorists and their leaders in the Gaza Strip,"" Olmert told the weekly Cabinet meeting.
""This is a continuing and incessant activity which we will pursue.""
Olmert's statement came one day after the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas claimed that Israeli special forces captured a senior commander of the movement's security forces.
Mohawah al-Qadi, a senior member of Hamas's armed wing and commander in its paramilitary Executive Force, was nabbed on Friday by undercover troops in the town of Rafah in southern Gaza, it said.
But a spokesman for the Israeli army told AFP that ""we have no knowledge of any such operation.""
The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades said Israeli soldiers in Executive Force uniforms hustled Qadi into a Subaru which then sped off to the Sufa crossing into Israel.
Al-Qadi, seized together with his assistant Saqer Abd al-Al, was ""responsible for the Executive Force public relations,"" the group said.
The Israeli army has carried out dozens of ground and air raids into Gaza in recent months in a bid to weaken Hamas, which seized control in the territory on June 15 after a week of factional clashes and ousted its Fatah rivals