Senior Hamas members are reportedly disappointed with the comparatively low number of 30,000 protesters who participated in this weekend's protests in Gaza, the first of a series of events expected to culminate in the "March of Return" on Nakba Day on May 15. Hamas reportedly expected some 100,000 demonstrators to turn out for Friday's event.
Nakba Day commemorates the displacement of Palestinian refugees during Israel's War of Independence, known in Arabic as the "Nakba" ("catastrophe").
Gaza's rulers were also said to be disappointed by the fact that a day after Friday's march, only a few hundred protesters remained from the tens of thousands who had gathered at six predetermined meeting points along the Gaza border from Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip to Jabaliya in the north.
Gaza's Health Ministry reported that 17 people were killed and another 1,400 wounded in Friday's border clashes.
However, Hamas is taking encouragement from the fact that Friday's march, which was intended to serve as a dress rehearsal for the Nakba Day march, was a relative success.
"There is some disappointment at the low turnout … we expected at least three times as many participants," a Hamas official told Israel Hayom.
The official said that Hamas was optimistic about the upcoming protests.
"If 30,000 showed up for the first event, a quarter million to a half million [people] at least will come to the Nakba Day march. We are very optimistic about what is to come. The residents of Gaza have proven that they are willing to sacrifice and pay for their freedom in blood."
In response to the numbers of dead and wounded, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared Saturday a national day of mourning and a general strike in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Hamas, meanwhile, condemned Abbas for ordering his security forces to prevent protesters from marching in solidarity in the West Bank.
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement, "Abbas did too little, too late. If he wants to help Gaza and unite the Palestinian people, he must cancel the sanctions on Gaza immediately."
Several Arab nations, including Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, issued condemnations of Israel over Friday's events along the border.
The Arab League announced it would convene an emergency conference over recent events. Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit called Israeli policy on the Gaza border "barbaric and criminal" and said the international community must condemn it.
Hamas marketed Friday's march as a part of a nonviolent popular struggle. Hamas-affiliated TV stations showed images of tens of thousands of protesters being bused to the meeting points, stressing that most of the marchers were families, women, and children.
Hamas senior military leader Yahya Sinwar – who rarely makes public appearances – responded to the IDF's criticism that senior Hamas officials rarely send their own families to protest at the border by presenting his wife and some of his children to the crowd and saying, "Today, we are presenting the Zionist enemy with a new equation. We are prepared to pay the price."
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said that "Land Day expresses the Palestinian people's solidarity with the Arabs of 1948 on the land of occupied Palestine. The [Palestinian] right of return is a national interest and no one in a position of authority will forgo it. The Zionists said the right of return will be forgotten, but the massive crowd proves that it has the homeland in its blood."
Haniyeh criticized the PA and Arab states for "abandoning the [Palestinian] issue for the sake of normalization with the Zionist occupation, despite the Trump administration giving Jerusalem to the occupation. What right did he have? Palestine comes before everything."
As Friday's march was underway, Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai and IDF Spokesman in Arabic Maj. Avichay Adraee published social media posts that showed Hamas exploiting children by sending them to the border fence to clash with soldiers.
"Hamas sent a 7-year-old girl from Gaza to the Israeli border. IDF soldiers returned her to her family. Hamas apparently isn't familiar with the famous hadith that tells of a 14-year-old boy whom the Prophet Muhammad forbade from fighting in war because of his age. There is no greater shame than using children for war, and every Muslim with a heart and a mind who knows the hadith rejects that. Recruiting children is a disgrace," Mordechai and Adraee wrote.
Adraee also tweeted, "The terrorist organization Hamas ignores the rights of women and children and sends them to the fence to achieve the group's terrorist goals while evading responsibility for their lives and welfare."
Land Day protests in the Israeli Arab sector also turned violent. Six Arab civilians were killed during demonstrations against the confiscation of Arab land in the Galilee. Most of the speakers at the Israeli Arab events criticized Israel for what transpired in Gaza on Friday.
Joint Arab List MK Jamal Zahalka called for the roads in the Wadi Ara area to be blocked off "in response to the IDF murders in Gaza. The international community must intervene immediately and stop the Israeli attack on the March of Return," he said.
Joint Arab List Chairman MK Ayman Odeh said, "On the Jewish holiday of freedom [Passover], the residents of the largest prison in the world are standing up and asking to live. Men, women and children who reside in Gaza are asking for liberty, and encountering a fence of brutality and obliviousness. As far as Israel is concerned, there is no way the Palestinians can protest that will be accepted as legitimate."
