Israel’s military showed journalists what a spokesman described as a cluster of weapons factories and tunnels used by Hamas fighters in Gaza to manufacture rockets, AFP reports.

Soldiers leading a media tour in Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip said that what looked like cement factories and other industrial facilities were in fact used to make missiles and shells stored in deep shafts.

Stood in a large hut with sunshine streaking through the gaps in the wall, army spokesman Daniel Hagari held what he said were detonators for rockets capable of hitting targets 100 kilometres away — a range covering much of central and southern Israel.

He told reporters at the site that “this factory was built embedded with Salah al-Din Road,” a major north-south route also used to transport humanitarian aid into the besieged territory.

The army said in a statement issued later that it was “the largest weapons production site found since the beginning” of the bombardment.

Some of the shafts were 30 meters (100 feet) deep and the tunnels formed a network that connected to Hamas fighters throughout Gaza, the statement said.

Bureij, just south of Gaza City, was home to more than 45,000 people before the Israeli bombardment of Gaza began in early October, according to data from the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA.

But many have fled the violence, and the areas shown to journalists during the army tour looked abandoned with no Palestinians in sight.

Israeli bulldozers crashed through a wrecked landscape, churning up tracts of dirt between badly damaged buildings as they tried to flatten the land and secure the area.