The recent round of attacks by Palestinians, which began in Jerusalem in September, has turned into a near-daily agony for Israelis. The Israeli army reports 90 stabbings, 33 shootings and 15 car rammings between Sep. 13 and Dec. 9, according to The Washington Post. In just the four days earlier this month, some 13 Israelis were shot, stabbed or deliberately rammed, the Post reported.

Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal exults in the random attacks. On Dec. 10 he declared from Kuala Lampur, Malaysia that "only the path of jihad's sacrifice and blood (will bear fruit)."

The Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki, tested opinions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between Dec. 10-12 among 1,270 adult respondents. Two-thirds of the population says they support the wave of stabbings and the same percentage back a larger armed uprising. Even allowing for the intimidating effects of living in those unfree communities, these are depressing figures. It seems 37 percent of Palestinians believe that the current wave of terrorism will ultimately morph into an armed intifada, and two-thirds say that a development in that vein would serve the national Palestinian interests in ways that negotiations could not.

Fifty percent of Palestinians believe that the development of recent events into popular confrontations is better than a negotiation with Israel, and 60 percent of the Palestinians want a return of intifada in the absence of a peace process. Partners for peace? Sixty-seven percent of the Palestinian public believes the use of knives is justified, with 31 percent opposed. A separate poll found that 81 percent of young Palestinians (age 16-35) support attacks on Israeli soldiers while 10 percent oppose them; 77 percent support attacks against settlers and 49 percent support attacks against Israeli civilians inside the Green Line.

Sixty-eight percent believe the Oslo Accord should be abandoned and only 45 percent support the two-state solution, while just 34 percent believe it is viable. Clearly what is missing is leadership for peace, and with it the independent state the Palestinians say they want. The frustration is reflected in 65 percent saying that Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas should resign. He received only 41 percent support in the poll against 51 percent for Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, who would defeat Abbas even if the elections were held only in the West Bank.

Abu Mazen, as Abbas is commonly known, and his top aides, while professing to oppose the ongoing violence, have done their deceitful best to stoke it. He refers to the last three months of violence as a "justified popular uprising." No wonder senior Israeli officials have lost trust in him. His chief negotiator paid a condolence visit to the family of a Palestinian Authority intelligence officer who had shot two Israelis before being killed himself.

Abbas betrays the best hopes of Israelis and Palestinians alike. He has now publicly confirmed – for the first time, according to The Tower Magazine – that he turned down a peace offer by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. The offer would have provided for an independent Palestinian state containing all of the Gaza Strip, much of the West Bank (with land swaps) and a tunnel connecting the two areas. In an interview on Israel Channel 10, reporter Raviv Drucker asked Abbas, "In the map that Olmert presented you, Israel would annex 6.3 percent [of the West Bank] and compensate the Palestinians with 5.8 percent [taken from the pre-1967 Israel]. What did you propose in return?" "I did not agree," Abbas replied, "I rejected it out of hand." So here you have it. After all the rhetoric, all the public posturing, we find out that it was Abbas who turned down that imaginative Israeli peace offer in favor of more bloodshed.

Consider what the naysayer Abbas regards as "justified" violence. A resident of East Jerusalem rams his car into a crowded bus stop on Herzl Boulevard near the entrance to the city. The person who sustained the most serious injuries was a 15-month old baby waiting at the stop with his mother. A member of the Israeli security forces shot the driver dead while he was still in the vehicle, averting a greater toll, but 14 people were injured.

Hamas boasts of its welfare work. The violence it has generated has resulted in costs which are immensely greater than the benefits of its charities. No social outlays on Hamas' part could possibly outweigh the impact of terrorism on the Palestinian access to the Israeli labor market and on the benefits that Palestinians, especially workers and their families from Gaza, derive from work in Israel.

"In the 1980s, before the first intifada, 40 to 50 percent of Gaza's workforce were employed in Israel," writes Hillel Frisch, professor at The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. "Their net wages were appreciatively higher than their fellow workers in Gaza and the West Bank. From the first intifada in 1987 onward, one sees a direct relationship between organized violence, increasingly carried out by Hamas, and the decline of access for Gazans to the Israeli labor market."

Hamas over the last year has been transferring tens of thousands of dollars a month to the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, in the Sinai to secure weapons shipments, primarily explosive rocket propellant, according to Israel's Ynetnews. "Egyptian security officials note that it is solely thanks to Hamas' monetary and professional support of ISIS in Sinai that the branch has, in the last few years, turned from a gang of Bedouin with light weapons into a well-trained, well-armed group of 800 militants" that has been fighting the Egyptian army, according to the news magazine. Quite simply, since taking power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas has focused on enacting violence instead of governing. "About half a year ago, Hamas provided the Islamic State in the Sinai with advanced Kornet anti-tank missiles and launchers to use against heavy-duty Egyptian army vehicles," Ynetnews reported, adding that since 2015, the commander of Islamic State's Sinai branch, Shadi al-Mani'i, has been staying in Gaza.

Hamas has to be stopped in its war-making. It is as dangerous an enemy to peace as the Islamic State group, and it is astounding that states provide aid to them. They have a moral duty on the contrary to pressure Hamas. Qatar, which has provided a safe haven to Hamas' Mashaal, is supposed to be our ally but it behaves disgracefully.

The Obama administration seems to be waking up. It should have pressed years ago for practical improvements in the Palestinian economy and daily life. Peace won't emerge from poverty, chaos, corruption and killing.