The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) said that the Israeli occupation army’s claim that it found weapons in Al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip is a “farcical farce.”

The movement added - in a brief statement published on Telegram - that “the Zionist occupation’s claim that it found weapons and equipment in the Shifa Medical Complex is nothing but a continuation of the lies and cheap propaganda through which it is trying to give justification for its crime aimed at destroying the health sector in Gaza.”

The movement added, "These allegations are the same trivial propaganda that Israel made during its storming of Rantisi Children's Hospital, where the occupation placed weapons in the place and staged a farce that no longer deceived anyone."

Hamas continued in its statement, "We repeated more than once and two weeks ago our call to the United Nations and international organizations to form an international committee to review the conditions of hospitals, and to determine the falsehood of the occupation's narrative and its false claims, because we are aware of the level of lies and deception that the occupation is spreading to cover up its crimes against children, women, and defenseless civilians."

At dawn on Wednesday, the Israeli occupation army stormed the Al-Shifa Medical Complex in a military operation that eyewitnesses described as a “nightmare,” at a time when the complex contained patients, injured people, and displaced people, in addition to its outer courtyard being crowded with dozens of bodies of martyrs of the Israeli raids on Gaza.

Sources from inside Al-Shifa Medical Hospital reported that the occupation forces arrested a number of displaced people and the families of the martyrs and wounded during their storming of the complex. A hospital source described the situation as "tragic."

There are about 1,500 members of the medical team in the Shifa complex, about 700 patients, 39 premature babies, and 7,000 displaced people, according to the government media office in Gaza.

A senior official in the occupation army said that "the forces found weapons and infrastructure belonging to terrorists" inside Al-Shifa Hospital, adding that no fighting had occurred inside the hospital complex.

The Israeli official did not specify which part of the hospital the forces were searching and inspecting, nor did he disclose the nature of what was found, but he said that evidence would be presented later.

Earlier Wednesday, Israeli Army Radio said that there were no indications of the presence of Israeli prisoners in Al-Shifa Hospital, even though the army claimed for weeks that there were Israeli prisoners there.

For days, Al-Shifa Hospital and its surroundings, as well as other hospitals in the Gaza Strip, have been subjected to Israeli bombing and siege, claiming that there is a headquarters for the Palestinian resistance there. This is repeatedly denied by the Hamas movement and Palestinian officials in the Strip.