Only hours after its troops took control of the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the Israel Defense Forces already is releasing evidence that Hamas used the facility in a military capacity. It is widely expected to the first of many such discoveries.

In a video, a spokesman for the IDF says troops discovered weapons and other military equipment hidden in the MRI center of the hospital complex, the largest in Gaza. Among the items discovered are weapons such as AK-47 rifles, ammunition magazines, hand grenades, military uniforms, and radio equipment. Most of the equipment had been hidden, and security cameras throughout the facility were deliberately obstructed, the spokesman said.

The discoveries “confirm, without any doubt, that Hamas uses hospitals in their military operations in violation of international law,” the spokesman said. “What we have found, I think, is only the tip of the iceberg.”

While the materiél is damning for Hamas, which has been stating for weeks that it does not use hospitals for command centers and begging the world to halt Israel’s assault on the complex, what has been uncovered so far is not nearly as damning as the more advanced equipment and hostage-holding facilities discovered in the basement of a pediatric hospital, the Rantisi, a few days earlier.

An IDF spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, told reporters in Israel Wednesday night that they believe some 200 terrorists returned to Shifa with their hostages after killing some 1,400 Israeli civilians on October 7. No fighters have been located in the facility since Israel took it over early Wednesday morning.

Mr. Hagari said the search of the hospital for further evidence will likely take time. “It is a complex area and there are still lots of civilians around,” he said. “However long it will take, there is no doubt that Hamas used it as an infrastructure of terror.”

Two and a half weeks after first launching the ground incursion into Gaza, Israeli troops and tanks entered the Shifa hospital complex early Wednesday morning despite protests from international leaders and pro-Hamas activists in the West. No IDF soldiers were lost in the operation, the IDF said, and five Hamas terrorists were killed.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, met Wednesday with an American delegation headed by a member of President Biden’s National Security Council, Bret McGurk to discuss progress in the war. Following the meeting, his office released a statement saying that the IDF operation was meant to “free Shifa Hospital from the control of the Hamas terror group” and that its success is evidence of his determination to completely root out Hamas from every corner of Gaza.