Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

Thank you.

It is time to officially recognise Jerusalem

as the capital of Israel.

To move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, claimed by both Palestinians and Israelis

as their capital.

A fierce international backlash to what the President is proposing.

His decision could plunge the region back into a fire with no end.

After President Trump's controversial decision to recognise

Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,

the Middle East braced itself for violence.

We had three-and-a-half years of quiet, and then that happened.

I thought, that's it, that's another war starting that day.

But in the Palestinian Gaza Strip, a grassroots movement planned

a different response - mass peaceful demonstrations.

Weekly protests at Gaza's unofficial border with Israel would culminate

in a massive demonstration on the day of the embassy opening,

the 14th of May 2018.

That day would end with at least 60 Palestinians dead or dying,

and almost 3,000 injured.

Using footage from the Israeli Army, Hamas, journalists

and the protesters themselves, this is the story of that day.

Allahu Akbar!

Our brave soldiers are protecting the borders of Israel

as we speak today. We salute you all.

How did Gaza's plan for a peaceful demonstration

result in one of the worst days of violence in a generation?

Remember this moment. This is history.

On the morning of the 14th of May 2018,

thousands of Palestinians began arriving

at Gaza's unofficial border.

The 14th of May was also the 70th anniversary

of the founding of Israel.

These weekly protests had been named The Great March Of Return.

They'd become a lightning rod for years of frustration.

In 2006, Hamas was elected to power in Gaza,

and then expelled its rivals.

In response, Israel tightened its economic blockade on the region,

citing security concerns, for strictly controlling

all movement of goods and people in and out of the Gaza Strip.

Today, the economy is in free fall.

More than half of Gaza's two million inhabitants live in poverty

and rely on aid.

And they're prevented from leaving what is

one of the most densely populated regions on Earth.

Most demonstrators stayed far away from the fence

and protested peacefully.

But in the days leading up to the 14th of May,

others had declared that they intended to break Israel's

blockade of Gaza by cutting through the fence and confronting

Israeli soldiers.

The Israel Defence Forces, or IDF, were preparing for an invasion.

Just 2km away, on the other side of the fence,

Israeli grandmother Adele Raemer was recording a video

for Facebook Live.

OK, it's really early in the morning.

I'm just taking my morning walk, and I see that there's a lot

of soldiers here, which there usually aren't.

And I look over into our fields,

and I can see a huge plume of smoke

coming from a little bit north of us in Gaza.

Something's going on already.

Yeah, it was scary. The Great March Of Return.

They... That's what they said they were going to do.

The Great March Of Return.

So that's what I was expecting that could happen,

that they could, in the thousands, walk...

..and just knock down the fence.

Everybody's on edge.

We've been assured by the army that everything is under control.

But we and they are ready for everything.

Gaza is ruled by Hamas,

seen in the West as a terrorist organisation.

They reject Israel's right to exist, and have a history of suicide

bombings and rocket attacks against the Jewish state.

Israel has fought three major conflicts with Hamas,

and it believed that these were no longer peaceful protests

but a violent attack on Israel.

In the run-up to the 14th of May, there'd been many confrontations

at the fence.

Women would often take the lead.

At previous protests, some people had even crossed

the fence and entered Israel.

The fence is monitored by an all-female team of Israeli

intelligence officers based in a secret control centre

in southern Israel.

The officers in the War Room are in direct communication

with forces on the ground, and will alert them to anything

they regard as suspicious.

Since early morning, Israeli forces had taken up position

behind the security fence separating Israel from Gaza.

They'd also laid an extra coil of barbed wire

to act as a deterrent.

About 300 metres away is Jakar Street, a Palestinian road

that runs parallel to the fence.

Israel regards the area between Jakar Street and the fence

as a military no-go zone.

70% of people in Gaza are descendants of refugees -

Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee their land when Israel

was created in 1948 and captured territory in the war of '67.

Palestinians across the Middle East have long held that they have

a legal right of return to what they see as their homeland.

But for most Israelis, the arrival of millions

of Palestinians would threaten their country's identity

as a Jewish state, and pose an existential threat.

GUNFIRE

GUNFIRE

GUNFIRE

That day, the IDF would be using live ammunition.

GUNFIRE

Despite the risk of gunfire, hundreds of Palestinians

were still determined to cross Jakar Street and head for the fence.

Among them were Wisal Khalil and her brother Mohammed.

Wisal was a regular at the protests

and had tried to cut the fence at least once.

That morning, Wisal had prayed by the Israeli fence,

hung a flag on it, then returned to talk to her friend.

GUNSHOT

WOMAN SCREAMS

A single gunshot hit Wisal in the head,

killing her instantly.

At 14, Wisal was one of the youngest people

to be killed that day.

Defending our civilians is non-negotiable.

That is our mission. That's what we are deployed to do,

that's what we are trained and equipped to do.

What about Wisal Sheikh Khalil, the 14-year-old?

How come she was shot in the head?

We've had numerous situations where...

..people have been hit without being the intended target

of that specific bullet.

It's a very unfortunate situation, something that we would surely...

That we surely wouldn't want to have happened.

One of the leading, let's say, line of thought,

or assessment, working assumption, would be that it was stray bullets

that hit a target and then changed direction.

How often do you think that happened?

According to the preliminary information we have at hand now,

that probably has happened a few times.

How many is a few? Difficult to say.

In the hour after Wisal was killed, more and more people were crossing

Jakar Street and getting closer to the fence.

Behind the crowd, two brothers had arrived

to join the protest.

Ayman and his brother Abdelsalam are both descendants of refugees.

In 1948, their father had fled the city of Ashdod,

in what is now Israel.

Today, it is almost impossible for them to visit.

Suddenly, the crowd surged forward.

A rumour was spreading

that protesters were about to breach the fence.

For Ayman and his brother, this was a rare chance

to step beyond the Gaza Strip.

The people at the front were filming on their phones,

believing they were about to be part of an historic event.

But as the crowd swelled, Israeli forces released a barrage

of tear gas.

They then opened fire with live ammunition.

In the chaos, Ayman and his brother had been separated.

Abdelsalam had also been shot in the head.

He died in hospital later that day.

Abdelsalam wasn't the first brother that Ayman had lost in the conflict.

16 years earlier, another brother, Ahmed,

had been killed by Israeli forces

while taking part in a military operation

with Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.

Ayman says that neither he nor Abdelsalam

had any involvement with armed groups.

But for the IDF, the whole protest was regarded

as a Hamas operation.

Trump's announcement that he would move the US Embassy

to Jerusalem had been the catalyst for peaceful protest at the fence.

Organised by a grassroots movement,

at first they weren't aligned with any political or armed groups.

As the protest grew more popular, leaders of groups like Hamas

and Islamic Jihad, both regarded by Israel

as terrorist organisations, started touring the sights

and rallying the crowds.

Over time, these leaders began to exert increasing control

over what was now known as The Great March Of Return.

I know for a fact that most of the people in Gaza are not Hamas,

like, militant Hamas.

Having said that, when the Hamas get up at their rallies,

they say, "We're going to go into Israel, pull out...

"rip out their hearts."

I mean, this is rhetoric that you can't just ignore.

Given that Israel regards you as a terrorist organisation,

why couldn't Hamas have just stayed out of all of this?

I mean, why not just let the people do their thing?

As noon prayers came to an end on the 14th of May,

a new wave of people flowed out of the mosques

to join the protests at the border.

It was fast becoming one of the biggest public demonstrations

in Gaza for a generation.

Despite the rising death toll,

people were still being urged to come.

We had intelligence a few days prior to the 14th

that Hamas were planning to breach the fence

by a rather simple, but what would seem an effective plan.

The first wave would be civilians, using civilians as cover

in order for a second wave of trained operatives to reach inside

and then, hopefully, from their point of view,

take one of the soldiers with them

and drag them back to the Gaza Strip.

Across Gaza, buses were provided by Hamas and others

to transport demonstrators to the protest sites on the border.

Aintisar was told that her bus was heading

for Gaza's main protest site,

but in fact, protest organisers were taking her somewhere else.

They brought her to an unofficial site near a graveyard,

with little cover and no medical facility.

It was also right next to a Hamas military training area.

As hundreds more people arrived,

four paramedics were dispatched to the area.

By chance, one of them was Aintisar's son, Moussa.

Moussa was a paramedic in Gaza's civil defence force,

part of the Hamas Ministry of the Interior.

With no field hospitals in the area,

he was one of the only medics in a crowd of hundreds.

24-year-old Bader had also been bussed in that day.

He'd never attended a protest before.

Eyewitnesses say at least two armed Palestinians

stood aside from the crowd and began firing on Israeli soldiers.

GUNSHOTS

The IDF have provided this infrared

video footage that they say

show shots being fired at Israeli soldiers

and IEDs being detonated.

It was all being monitored from the IDF War Room

a few miles away.

GUNFIRE, CROWD SHOUTING

The IDF fired back for 40 minutes.

Moussa was one of only four medics treating the wounded.

Whilst he was treating three casualties,

and wearing a paramedic's vest, he was shot through the chest.

With his mother by his side, he lay bleeding for over 25 minutes

before his colleagues were able to evacuate him.

At the hospital, he was declared dead on arrival.

SHE SOBS

21 people were killed at the graveyard that afternoon.

At least eight of them were alleged members of al-Qassam Brigades,

the military wing of Hamas.

Two of them were children.

No Israelis were hurt.

The Hamas leadership denies they sanctioned a military operation

that day, but admits that Palestinians opened fire.

What did happen at the graveyard?

The guidance to the soldiers by commanders on the ground

was, "Be proportionate, be precise, be professional.

"Remember that you're defending civilians behind you,

"but also remember that you're to use your weapons

"only when necessary, and only in a situation

"where we don't have any other means

"of stopping somebody from posing a threat."

We defended our civilians and we upheld our sovereignty,

and we denied Hamas any significant military claim.

The injured were being evacuated to the hospitals in the cities.

But by mid-afternoon, they were overwhelmed.

The Ministry of Health called on citizens to give blood

and declared a medical emergency.

Jamie McGoldrick from the UN had been monitoring the situation

from his office in Gaza City.

Reports from the various news outlets were saying,

50 people, 30 people. The number was growing,

and we could see at some point

it was starting to mount quite significantly,

and we knew there was a delay in that as well.

It was that point in time we realised that we had to go there

and see if there was any support further that we could do and give.

You couldn't drive in cos they'd cut this area up into the triage area.

So this flow was appearing in bigger numbers,

people who are tending to wounded,

tending to people being brought in on stretchers.

The more severely wounded were taken inside to the emergency area,

and it was getting log jammed.

The doctors were running around because they had never seen

this number in this way.

Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!

Patients were everywhere.

They were in the corridors. They were in the outpatient clinics,

in the paediatric ward, in the gynaecology ward,

lying everywhere.

We tried to stop bleeding for some patients in the corridors.

Patients were shouting on the other side.

Patients were standing in queues to enter the OT rooms

to have their operation done, life-saving operations.

Some of them died waiting there.

And you're not speaking about ten patients, 20 patients.

You are speaking about 1,000 patients at one day

having live gunshot injuries,

with a hospital with a capacity of three beds

and another hospital with six beds, and another hospital with five beds.

In total, 40 beds with 1,000 injuries.

That's...

You do the calculation.

Doctors would discover that, over a period of eight hours that day,

the IDF shot over 1,000 Palestinians,

an average of one person every 30 seconds.

Most of these people were shot in the leg.

Bones turned to dust.

It's like an epidemic or an outbreak of gunshots.

When you say an outbreak of disease, it's an outbreak of gunshots.

It's...unusual.

At 3:30, Gaza's Health Ministry reported that 37 Palestinians

had been killed and over 1,700 injured.

So far, not a single protester had crossed into Israel.

The crowds rallied for a final push.

Allahu Akbar!

So it was allowed to shoot someone

to prevent them from coming to the fence? Is that right?

As a result of being shot,

Bashir's leg was amputated above the knee.

According to Gaza's Ministry of Health,

he's one of 17 people to lose a limb after being injured

on May the 14th.

As four o'clock approached, crowds and dignitaries gathered

in Jerusalem for the official opening ceremony

of the new US Embassy.

NEWS REPORT: If ever there was a vision of two distinct realities

when it comes to this conflict, it is here today

over the official recognition of Israel's capital...

NEWS REPORT: Here in the embassy compound, the Israelis are jubilant.

NEWS REPORT: And for this joyous celebration,

a high-powered American delegation, nearly the entire Israeli cabinet.

There was a sense of the gravitas of the moment.

There was a solemnity to it, almost a religious cast to it.

For myself, as a Jew, you know, waiting basically for this moment

for 2,000 years,

as an Israeli waiting for this moment for 70 years,

having basically fought for this moment, not just in the army,

but fought for this moment in diplomacy,

er, it was a moment of great fulfilment for me.

There was a sense of being in the moment of history.

CROWD CHEERS AND APPLAUDS

On behalf of the 45th President of the United States of America,

we welcome you officially and for the first time

to the Embassy of the United States here in Jerusalem,

the capital of Israel. Thank you.

CROWD APPLAUDS AND CHEERS

I went over to interview at a bank of cameras representing

the international media and found myself being interviewed

not so much about the ceremony

but rather about what was happening in Gaza.

We're told 25 people now dead.

How does that impact what's happening today?

It's not going to impact in any way the jubilation you see

going on behind us. We've waited for this moment for many, many years.

The narrative was going to go out there that while Israel

was celebrating this event, Israeli soldiers were accused

of firing wantonly and indiscriminately

at peaceful demonstrators.

No Hamas, no attempt to break through the border,

no sense that our people were in danger of imminent massacre.

And it began to sink in that the ceremony,

the inauguration ceremony, would be marshalled

as evidence against us.

It is now my great honour to call upon the Prime Minister

of the state of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Dear friends, the embassy of the most powerful nation

on Earth, our greatest ally, the United States of America,

today, its embassy opened here.

We are in Jerusalem, and we are here to stay.

We are here in Jerusalem protected by the brave soldiers

of the army of Israel.

Our brave soldiers are protecting the borders of Israel

as we speak today.

We salute them all, all of you!

What a glorious day.

Remember this moment.

This is history.

With the death toll still rising,

Hamas and the protest organisers called an end

to the day's demonstrations.

By the end of the 14th of May 2018,

at least 60 Palestinians were dead or dying,

and over 2,700 were injured.

One Israeli was hurt.

Hamas later claimed more than 50 of the dead as their own.

You have 60,000 people there.

Around 60 get killed.

52 of them are Hamas.

That is actually the Israeli army exercising tremendous restraint

in the face of a dire security threat.

The paramedic Moussa Abu Hassanein

was one of the dead claimed by Hamas.

Palestinians say that, like most of the dead,

he had nothing to do with the organisation's armed wing

and was posing no threat to Israel when he was shot.

Civilians who participated in these riots

paid an unfortunate price.

And what's really sad is that it doesn't seem as if Hamas

has changed its strategy or is thinking of doing anything else.

We did not understand.

Israel didn't understand this enough -

that the protester, that the rioter in Gaza,

is the new missile.

If they're shot, rioters are shot, they inflame public opinion

in the world much better than rocket fire does.

And this was proof of it.