The Israeli families had set up a peace tent on Rabin Square here and started a "relay" hunger strike, with a different family taking part daily.

The day before their visit to Gaza they staged, together with several peace groups, a candlelight vigil on Rabin Square. They set up 310 cardboard figures to represent the Palestinians and Israelis killed (at least 277 Palestinians and 34 Israelis) in the last two months of clashes.

According to the participants at Gaza, the meeting with Arafat was serious and emotional. The purpose, according to Yitzhak Frankental, the head of the delegation, was to convey a message to both sides asking for an end to the clashes in the Palestinian territories and a return to the negotiation table. The meeting was repeated the next day with Barak.

Arafat answered the request of the Israeli delegation, with tears in his eyes, saying that he is determined to do all in his power to make peace with Israel. He expressed an honest desire to renew talks with Barak, the goal of which should be to establish peaceful and good-neighborly relations between the Palestinian state and Israel.

After meeting with Arafat, the Israeli delegation met with a group of Palestinian families who had lost their loved ones in the uprising. Their spokesman, Adib Ma’ana, later told the press that they used the visit to Gaza to convey to the Israeli public and their government a message asking for an end to the violence from the Israeli occupation army and Jewish settlers, as well as lifting the economic boycott and the arbitrary closure that prevents thousands of Palestinian workers from reaching their jobs.

"Our Intifada [the Arab word for uprising] is an Intifada for peace that does not aim to destroy the State of Israel, as claimed by the media, but a legitimate fight to restore our vested national rights, including our right to establish our independent Palestinian state within the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, eastern Jerusalem included," Ma’ana stressed. "We are not seeking revenge for the streams of blood, the occupation has cost us, we are looking for peace and mutual respect."

He said that the settlements Israel has on Palestinian soil are "a symbol of robbery, instigation and hatred, a continuation of the hostilities between our two peoples. Israel has to leave our country to the pre-1967 borders and take the settlers with them. This is absolutely necessary in order to achieve true and lasting peace."