The Palestinian Authority leadership doesn’t believe negotiations with Israel will produce any results, and therefore plans to step up its anti-Israel activity in international forums, intelligence officials say.

This assessment, which is shared by most of Israeli’s intelligence agencies, is based on the statements made by both sides ever since Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government was formed.

The agencies predict that the PA will adopt a confrontational stance and try to undermine Israel’s standing in international agencies – not only the United Nations, but also dozens of other organizations, along the lines of last week’s failed bid to get Israel suspended from FIFA, the international soccer federation. At this stage, they say, the struggle will remain largely nonviolent.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas has despaired of negotiations both because of their lack of results during the sporadic talks he held during Netanyahu’s two previous terms and because of Netanyahu’s conflicting statements about the two-state solution in recent months. Abbas is apparently convinced that Netanyahu’s sole goal is to buy time until U.S. President Barack Obama’s term ends in January 2017.

Regardless of who succeeds Obama – whether a Republican or leading Democratic contender Hillary Clinton – both Abbas and Netanyahu think the next U.S. administration will be friendlier to Israel than the current one.

In an interview with Channel 2 television’s “Uvda” program that aired on Tuesday night, Obama assailed Netanyahu’s objections to the ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran. Israel’s impression is that Washington wants to prevent any diplomatic clash between Israel and the PA until an agreement with Iran is signed. That is supposed to happen at the end of this month, but the deadline might be extended.

Consequently, France has acceded to an American request to defer submitting its proposed UN Security Council resolution on ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and creating a Palestinian state. The resolution will apparently not be discussed until after the Iran deal is signed.

The U.S. is also trying to persuade the PA to refrain, for the time being, from any moves in international forums that Israel would consider extreme, like its application to join the International Criminal Court earlier this year.

In response to the ICC application, Jerusalem froze tax transfers to the PA. But the transfers were unfrozen shortly after Israel’s March election, and since then security coordination between Israel and the PA has returned to its previous high level. Military sources told Haaretz that the PA works constantly to thwart terror attacks in the West Bank.

Nevertheless, the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet security service are worried about two possible scenarios. One is a continuation of the recent spate of lone-wolf attacks. These attacks, in which cars or knives are generally the weapon of choice, have mostly taken place in Jerusalem and its environs.

The second is another successful attack by Hamas’ military wing. Hamas cells in the West Bank are highly compartmentalized, and past experience has shown that Israel’s intelligence coverage of these cells is relatively weak in the Hebron area, where the cell that kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teens last year was based.

The IDF doesn’t see much danger of a third intifada breaking out in the next few months. The PA leadership evidently prefers to do battle in international forums, bolstered when necessary by mass demonstrations in the West Bank, and it seems likely to try to prevent any outbreak of violence that it would have trouble controlling.

But such an outbreak could be sparked by clashes between Palestinians and settlers, or by a flare-up of tensions over Jewish visits to the Temple Mount. Last October there was a spate of lone-wolf attacks in Jerusalem and, to a lesser extent, the West Bank that was sparked primarily by Palestinian anger over visits to the Mount by rightist ministers and Knesset members. Once Netanyahu took steps to halt these visits, the attacks died down within a few weeks.