At least 12 Palestinians have died on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip: it is the balance at the time of the March of Return, the protest along the border convened by Hamas in memory of the confiscated Palestinian lands. The Gaza Ministry of Health speaks of over a thousand injured.
The Israeli army opened fire on several occasions with artillery strikes, live ammunition and rubber bullets near the security fence in front of which 17,000 Palestinians demonstrated. Pebbles and Molotov cocktails were thrown from the crowd to the military. According to the Israeli general Eyal Zamir, the army intervened because he "identified some terrorists who tried to conduct attacks, disguising themselves as protesters". Zamir asked Palestinian residents to stay away from the border and accused Hamas of being responsible for the ongoing clashes.
The Palestinian National Authority has requested the intervention of the international community. Yusef al Mahmoud, Palestinian National Authority spokesman in Ramallah, called for "immediate and urgent international action to stop the shedding of our Palestinian people's blood by Israeli occupation forces".
The protest, which according to the organizers was supposed to be peaceful, has the objective of realizing the "right of return", the Palestinian request that the descendants of the refugees deprived of their homes in 1948 can return to the properties of their family in the territories that currently belong to Israel. The demonstrations started from six points of the arid border between Gaza and Israel, about fifty kilometers long: in particular Rafah and Khan Younis in the south, el-Bureij and Gaza City in the middle, Jabalya in the north. The Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, harangued the crowd assuring that "it is the beginning of the return of all Palestinians".