There had been daily protests in Gaza throughout the six-week period known as the Great March of Return, which culminates in May 15’s Nakba Day commemoration of the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence that drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their ancestral lands. Dozens of Palestinians had already been killed in David vs. Goliath skirmishes with the notoriously trigger-happy Israeli Defense Forces on the other side of the beleagured Strip.

The potential as Nakba Day approached for an escalation of the violence was obvious, but no one expected the ferocity of what happened on its eve as Gazans expressed their collective outrage at Donald Trump’s decision to move the United States Embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem.

This extraordinarily crass and inflammatory move reversed America’s long-standing policy that the city’s status could only be decided in negotiations with the Palestinians – who, in the event of the Two State Settlement, supported by the European Union, believe that East Jerusalem should be the capital of the Palestinian nation.