Muhammad Thuraya, a Hamas representative on the organizing committee for the demonstrations, said the payments were the least the group could do. “This is our duty to our people, to ease the suffering of our citizens,” he said in an interview. “This does not mean that we are promoting people for death. We will offer what we can for our people.”

Demonstrators set up a symbolic cemetery at the staging grounds for Friday’s protest to commemorate those killed last week. But the scene was otherwise almost festive. A volleyball court was set up for a competition between teams of amputees, sponsored by the son of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political director. A speaker at a mock court pronounced sentences on absent “Israeli war criminals” while a small crowd watched approvingly. And Mr. Thuraya said a bride and groom would celebrate their wedding at the demonstrations on Friday afternoon.

Umm Muhammad Marzoug, 44, took her four children to the site late Thursday to look around and said they would return on Friday, despite the risks. She said the economic, social and political pressures of life in Gaza had brought her to this point.

“We live together, or we die together,” she said.

In Israel, meanwhile, a debate broke out over the military’s use of live ammunition after B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, placed ads in the newspapers Haaretz and Maariv calling on soldiers to disregard orders to shoot. Quoting a legal precedent as well known in Israel as the My Lai massacre is in the United States — stemming from the massacre of dozens of Arab civilians in Kafr Qasim in 1956 — the group warned that some orders were so blatantly illegal that it “pains the eye and outrages the heart, if the eye be not blind and the heart be not callous or corrupt.”

“This is part of the moral ethos of this country, something Israelis are taught in school, that army officers are taught as part of their training and that is the moral compass we’re all supposed to follow,” said Hagai El-Ad, B’Tselem’s executive director. “And we’re stating that front and center and demanding that we will follow it now.”

General Manelis would not discuss the rules of engagement for Israeli soldiers, and particularly snipers, on when to use live ammunition as opposed to rubber bullets, tear gas or other means of riot control.

But former Israeli military lawyers argued that there were plenty of situations in which firing on unarmed demonstrators could be justified.