Israeli forces launched an operation in and around Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, with witnesses reporting air strikes and tanks near the complex crowded with patients and displaced people.

The Israeli military told Gazans to immediately evacuate from Al-Shifa in Gaza City after it launched the raid based on what the army termed intelligence “indicating the use of the hospital by senior Hamas terrorists”.

Witnesses told AFP that the Israeli forces had dropped Arabic-language leaflets with the same evacuation instructions and a warning that “You are in a dangerous combat zone!” The health ministry of the Gaza Strip said residents near the hospital in the largely devastated city had reported dozens of casualties who could not be helped “due to the intensity of gunfire and artillery shelling”.

The government media office condemned as a “war crime” the “storming of the Al-Shifa medical complex with tanks, drones and weapons, and shooting inside”, where thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering.