For the 30th week in a row, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have taken part in the weekly protests dubbed the "Great March of Return," in the strip's northern areas along the security fence with Israel.

The protests, which recently included sea demonstrations, demand the renowned right of return be implemented to allow millions of Palestinians return to the areas and villages from where they were driven out of in 1948 as a result of the massacres that had been committed by the Zionist gangs of Haganah and Irgun against thousands of Palestinians.

The Gazan protesters call for an immediate end to the 12-year-long Israeli sea, land, and air blockade that has crippled life in the coastal enclave and brought it to the verge of collapse.

According to official data, Gaza's poverty rate is among the highest in the world with roughly 80 percent of Gazans falling beneath the poverty line and unemployment reaching 50 percent. Even Gaza's water is not safe for human use. People there are also suffering from massive power shortages; they only get electricity four hours a day, which badly affects services like sewage-treatment plants.

Even the blockaded strip's only means of access to the outdoor world, the ill-famed Rafah border crossing, has been for some time closed throughout the year except for infrequent openings by the Egyptian authorities. That makes Gaza, with a population of 2 million people, the biggest prison in the world.

The idea of the Great March of Return was creative, by showing the absent character of the Palestinian freedom fighter via a peaceful struggle. This kind of struggle managed to widely embarrass the Israeli state. Thus, the weekly marches portrayed Israel as a fully rouge state with forces shooting unarmed and innocent demonstrators despite the protests being broadcast live by the world's prominent media outlets.

Many Palestinian and Arab commentators argue that the importance of the weekly protests, staged close to the buffer zone, stem from being the last chance for people in Gaza to break the siege that has lasted for more than a decade.

To a great extent, I agree with this point of view and currently the weekly protests represent the biggest hope for breaking the 12-year long siege; they should be utilized as a starting point for reviving the Palestinians' right of return.

Being in a region full of crises and conflicts –turmoil in Egypt, Syrian war, Yemeni war, tumult in Libya and the Gulf crisis – the issue of the Gaza blockade had been marginalized and no longer a priority for the Arab peoples before their regimes. Therefore, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip felt that they themselves had to take the initiative, drawing the entire world's attention to their longstanding suffering that culminated in the Great March of Return, which managed to put the forgotten blockade issue in the news again.

The Arab world, alas, became not only busy with their own causes but also a part of the blockade problem. In the past, any Arab regime that was not supporting the Palestinian cause, was, at least, a neutral actor in the Arab-Israeli conflict. These days, we see many Arab regimes – with no ties to Israel in public – assuming antagonizing policies that demonize the Palestinian people and their cause. Needless to say, some Arab regimes are acting these days as godfather for the expected controversial peace deal, known as the "Deal of the Century," which prompted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to say early this year that "Israel ties with Arab countries are improving beyond imagination."

Moreover, any military escalation will not serve the Gazan's interests these days. People in the Gaza Strip have had very bad experiences with the military choices Israel resorted to in three consecutive attacks against Gaza in 2008, 2012 and 2014. The Palestinians don't have the capability to mount a military defense against Israel nor the ability to break the siege and they have no power to start or end any military operation. Rather, the international superpowers are on the Israeli side and, as mentioned earlier, the Arab situation around them is in turmoil.

Amid such an Arab situation and limited Palestinian capabilities, it is fair to suppose that the Great March of Return may amount to the Gazan's biggest hope to break the unjust blockade. At the same time, periodically staging protests for the right of return will sooner or later inspire the people of the West Bank, Palestinians living inside Israel, and the Palestinian refugees abroad to organize in protests as well, with a view to establishing permanent pressure on Israel to accept the demands of Palestinian refugees.

* Ph.D. student in Yıldırım Beyazıt University's Department of International Relations