Rallies were organized in other localities with a large Palestinian population, including Kafr Kanna, Rahat, Tamra, and Kafr Arara, and in Arab villages of the Negev desert. Elsewhere in the Middle East, 50,000 mobilized in Beirut, and thousands turned out in other Lebanese cities.

The day commemorates the 1976 fatal shooting by Israeli security forces of six Palestinians, who were citizens of Israel, during protests against government land expropriations.

These were the largest mobilizations of Palestinians inside Israel since October when 13 people were killed by Israeli security forces. High school students and other young people turned out in large numbers in Sakhnin, helping to put a militant stamp on the action. The protest was also marked by the diversity of the forces participating, including Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset, or parliament; other elected officials and public figures; and members of Israeli peace organizations, including the Peace Now movement.

Recalling the October events and the massacre of 25 years ago, Muhammad Ganayiam told reporters in Sakhnin, "I was 14 in 1976, and I saw everything. But then the years passed, and we began to think of it as a onetime event. Until October. Now we despair that after all these years, we're back in the same place." In the Israeli Palestinian community, noted the New York Times, "life is divided into before and after October." Some Palestinians in Israel, often called Israeli Arabs, hold Israeli citizenship but faced second-class status in the country.

The bloodless outcome of the protest was in itself a victory, as organizers and participants prevented the police from intervening, and kept them well away from the high school where the protest occurred. In other demonstrations inside Israel, the security forces were also forced to keep their distance.

In the West Bank city of Nablus, however, Israeli troops answered stone-throwing youth with deadly fire, killing five. Another Palestinian was killed by an Israeli bullet to the head in Ramallah in a protest of 1,000.

Just prior to the Land Day protests, the Financial Times noted an upturn in the number of protest actions by Palestinians. The Times quoted Marwan Barghouti, a leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), who told the Israeli Ha'aretz newspaper, "We should encourage the participation of other people, and concentrate on nonviolent means so that all will participate in the activities."

The Financial Times article commented, "Mr. Barghouti's statement coincided with a number of peaceful protests, including one by women and one by artists at Israeli checkpoints outside the Palestinian town of Ramallah." In the Ramallah protests two weeks earlier, Palestinians had demanded that the Israeli government dismantle barricades around the town, lift their tank-enforced siege, and reopen the road to Bir Zeit university. Palestinian spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi was injured when Israeli forces lobbed stun grenades into the crowd at a women's protest there.

The big-business newspaper commented further that the timing of Barghouti's announcement "appeared to indicate a post facto recognition that groups that have felt themselves marginalized during the years of Palestinian Authority rule had decided to make their own stand against the Israeli occupation."  
 
 
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