500 internal server error on fresh Laravel installation

I have just installed Laravel on my host following the official site's step by step guide and created an app called core, using the command

laravel new core

after seeing the success message I uploaded everything to my host, but when i try to access the /core/public folder from the browser i get 500 error on Chrome and nothing at all on firefox. if i run the command

php artisan list

On SSH inside my core folder i get:

Status: 500 Internal Server Error
Content-type: text/html

Can anyone of you Laravel experts let me know please where did i go wrong? thanks in advance

In the error log i found:

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 'class' (T_CLASS), expecting identifier (T_STRING) or variable (T_VARIABLE) or '{' or '$' in ...public_html/laravel/core/public/index.php on line 50

even though i haven't touched any files, line 50 is:

$kernel = $app->make(Illuminate\Contracts\Http\Kernel::class);

via Chebli Mohamed