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.