JERUSALEM — A joyous ceremony marked the inauguration of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem on Monday, a largely symbolic step that nonetheless is of deep political significance, here and in the Palestinian territories, as well as farther away.

Amid the happy bustle of about 800 guests, as Jared Kushner spoke, the controversial evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress blessed the occasion and President Trump delivered a prerecorded video address, there was little indication of what was unfolding less than 60 miles away on the border between Israel and Gaza. There, protests against the embassy opening and Israel’s continued blockade of the Palestinian enclave were met with gunfire by Israeli troops. Dozens of Palestinians were shot dead and thousands were injured.

[Israelis kill more than 50 Palestinians in Gaza protests, health officials say]

In his video address Monday, Trump said that he was still hopeful for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, despite almost universal criticism of the embassy move from some of the United States’s closest allies in Europe, from Arab nations and from the Palestinians. 

The Arab League called a crisis meeting to discuss the “illegal” U.S. Embassy shift, and the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation called it an “attack on the historical, legal, natural and national rights of the Palestinian people.”

In Ramallah, at a hastily convened news conference, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared the new embassy “an illegal outpost,” a term used to refer to Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land in the West Bank. 

Calling Monday’s killings in Gaza “a massacre,” Abbas said that the United States had “excluded itself as an intermediate broker.” 

But successive speakers who took the stage at Monday’s ceremony said that they firmly believed the embassy move was long overdue and was, in fact, a positive step toward peace. 

The U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, kicked off the proceedings by recalling the declaration of the state of Israel by the country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, on May 14, 1948.