In a conflict of few compromises, the Gaza Strip has always been hardcore. Home to both the toughest Palestinian resistance and the Israeli military’s most punitive tactics, it has never surprised me during my many years as a reporter covering this seemingly interminable battle of wills, that it was in Gaza that the first Palestinian uprising or intifada broke out back in 1987.

It was some years later though in 2005 that I met Abu Salah Shikir. He was a former geography teacher in Gaza who before the Israelis bulldozed his home during a military operation the year before, liked to write love songs and poems in in his spare time.

“In Gaza there is no gold, there is no oil, only sand and sadness. People eat their sadness daily,” he told me one afternoon as we stood looking at the rubble that had once been his family home.

These last few days Palestinians in Gaza have once again been “eating sadness” as they come to terms with at least 17 dead and over a thousand wounded by Israeli gunfire on Friday.

The deaths marked the greatest number of Palestinian fatalities in a single day at the hands of Israeli forces since a ceasefire ended Israel’s 51-day military assault on the Gaza Strip in summer 2014, which killed more than 2,200 Palestinians.

Israeli forces have killed 34 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip so far this year. Five Israelis were killed in the West Bank during the same period.

Yesterday, the Palestinian Authority (PA) declared a day of national mourning following the latest deaths during a major demonstration, after thousands marched near Gaza’s border with Israel marking the 42nd anniversary of Land Day.

The march aimed to commemorate the deaths of six Palestinians killed during protests against Israeli land confiscation in the Galilee in 1976.

An estimated 50,000 residents of the besieged enclave answered an activist’s call to embrace civil disobedience by demonstrating close to the border fence, an area defined by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) as a closed military zone.

Tents have been erected at five locations along Gaza’s eastern boundary for a six-week protest that will end on the May 15, when Palestinians also commemorate the Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’, the common term by which they remember the mass expulsions and massacres that accompanied the 1948 war and declaration of the state of Israel.

Just like back in those days when then Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion ordered the army to shoot and kill any Palestinian who dared cross the new borders to return to their land, 70 years later, the IDF implemented much the same policy on Friday against what had been dubbed Gaza’s ‘Great Return March’.

The Israeli military justified the show of force on the grounds that the Palestinian group dominant in Gaza, Hamas, might exploit the event in some way with acts of violence. But Israel’s real fear of the “return marchers” runs far deeper.

Few things trouble Israel more than the demand of Palestinian refugees for a right to return to their pre-1948 homes. And no group of refugees has a stronger case than those of Gaza many of whom live within a few miles of their former villages.

Some 1.3 million of Gaza’s two million inhabitants are refugees, descendants of Palestinians who were driven from their homes in the territories taken over by Israel during the 1948 war.

Since then, Israel has denied them from returning to the land from which they were expelled, a right enshrined in international law.

But while this weekend's demonstration might have been dubbed the ‘Great March of Return’ some human rights observers insist it has just as much to do with Gazans broiling frustration over their collective incarceration in a territorial ghetto cut off by the Israeli military.

With the political climate in Israel veering ever further to the right under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinians have grown increasingly disillusioned regarding the likelihood of negotiations or an improvement in their living situation in Gaza. Much the same is true in the West Bank and in Israel itself.

Nowhere though is the situation as dire as in Gaza, which for some time has stood on the brink of a full-blown humanitarian disaster.

For those who have never visited this small coastal strip it’s difficult to comprehend the level of hardship Palestinians there face.

Barely 28 miles long and four miles wide, the strip, remains one of the most densely populated places on earth. Swathes of its territory comprise shabby concrete city blocks, cinder-brick shanties and filthy overcrowded refugee camps, places where open sewers criss-cross dusty alleyways and few houses have electricity or clean running water.

Everywhere buildings that were once homes have been reduced to mounds of compressed concrete and steel by repeated Israeli air strikes.

Many buildings still standing look like a movie set from the final siege scenes of a war film. Pockmarked with bullet and shrapnel holes, the larger gaping chasms are evidence of where Israeli shells had gone clean through, sometimes blowing people’s lives away in an instant.

In this morass, unemployment tops 46 per cent with more than 60 per cent of those in the 15-29 age group going without work.

With precious little progress in rebuilding Gaza’s devastated infrastructure or homes destroyed in three destructive Israeli offensives since 2008, an easing of the blockade is the only slim hope to avoid a full-blown humanitarian crisis that has long been forewarned.

The events of the last few days, which many predict will escalate, have only added to the overwhelming burden on Gaza’s meagre resources.

“Medical facilities in Gaza, which have already been overstrained by the longstanding shortages of medical supplies, electricity and fuel, are struggling to cope with the overwhelming number of casualties,” the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs was quoted as saying on Friday.

Gaza’s health ministry reported “shortages of essential medical supplies, including emergency and anaesthesia drugs and disposables, in addition to essential laboratory materials,” the UN group added.

SNIPERS, DEATH AND FEARS OF ANOTHER CONFLAGRATION

Nearly 1,500 Palestinians were injured on Friday according to the health ministry, almost half by live Israeli fire. Twenty were said to be in a critical condition.

One of those killed on Friday was farmer Omar Wahid Samour, 26, who died when Israeli forces fired artillery shells at him while he was on his land, more than 700 yards from the boundary fence, in southern Gaza.

In what is seen by many as a move again breaching international law, the Israeli military apparently operates under a shoot-to-kill policy and said it had deployed more than 100 snipers to shoot anyone coming within 300 metres of the fence.

Lieutenant-General Gadi Eizenkot, the Israeli military's chief of staff, said that the military would not allow “mass infiltration” or tolerate damage to the barrier during the protests.

“We have deployed more than 100 sharpshooters who were called up from all of the military's units, primarily from the special forces,” Eizenkot said in the interview.

“If lives are in jeopardy, there is permission to open fire. We won't allow mass infiltration into Israel and to damage the fence, and certainly not to reach the communities.”

While Gaza organisers have insisted that the demonstrations will be peaceful, several incidents of Gazans being detained after entering Israel in recent days, including three Palestinians who were carrying weapons, have seen Israeli forces keen to prove their control of the situation.

The Israeli military accused Hamas of “cynically exploiting women and children, sending them to the security fence and endangering their lives”.

But witnesses insisted that while some rocks were hurled in the direction of the border fence during the day, Israeli forces had initiated the violence against the unarmed protesters.

Video of them being shot by the snipers, including at least one young man who was engaged in prayer at the time, appalled observers from both communities.

B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group, denounced the Israeli military’s “manifestly illegal” use of deadly force.

“Israel has made Gaza a huge prison, yet forbids the prisoners even to protest against this, on pain of death,” the group said in statement.

B’Tselem’s condemnation was echoed by the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, who said that Israeli use of snipers was in breach of international law.

Ayman Odeh, who leads the Joint List, an alliance of Arab parties in Israel’s parliament, also condemned the violence in a Twitter message written in Hebrew on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

“On the Jewish festival of freedom of all days, the residents of the world’s largest prison are asking to live,” Odeh wrote.

“Men, women, and children, residents of Gaza, are marching to demand their freedom, facing off against indifference and cruelty. From Israel’s perspective, there is no legitimate form of Palestinian protest. Even such a model of non-violent popular struggle is met with armed soldiers who do not hesitate to fire at unarmed demonstrators.”

Gazans have long become accustomed to the Israeli military’s no quarter tactics. And while the past year may have seemed largely quiet from the outside, Gaza is never far from violence.

For some time now speculation has loomed that Israel is on the verge of yet another major military onslaught against the coastal enclave it has besieged for years.

According to the online pro-Palestinian website the Electronic Intifada (IE) analysts are divided over prospects for a full-blown conflagration.

It quotes Omar Jaara an Israel affairs professor at An-Najah National University in the occupied West Bank, as saying that war was “only a matter of time.”

“Israel is the one who is controlling the situation here. The resistance will not stay silent in front of Israeli attacks on its weapons, especially the tunnels which are a strategic weapon of Hamas. Any continued threat to this weapon will lead to a fourth war,” insists Jaara.

But Wesam Afifa, director general of the Gaza-based al-Aqsa media network, sees it another way. He believes Israel is not interested in another war because it is already achieving its objectives, notably on Jerusalem and the US embassy, and doesn’t want to rock the boat.

“Israel is afraid of escalation in Gaza in light of popular anger against Trump’s decision. That could easily spread to the West Bank and Jerusalem,” says Afifa.

For the time being though the signs are not good and a major escalation remains the most likely scenario.

Desperation among Gazans has deepened and most are sick of living in what is tantamount to a giant cage. For them there is little left to lose by pursuing their rights.

Sixty-five-year old Fatima Nasser, who had come to Friday’s demonstration with her seven children all of whom were unemployed, summed up their outlook.

“To die with dignity is better than living a life full of humiliation. We will return to our land, we will return to our homeland,” she said. “Israel kills us anyway, whether it’s by shooting or blockade."

Her remarks reminded me of how little has changed in Gaza since my encounter all those years ago with Abu Salah Shikir.

“I don’t hate the Israelis,” he told me while we stood looking at the ruins of his home. “But if another country came to Scotland and occupied it, would you hand them a flower?