The events that led to the latest spike in tensions between Israelis and Palestinians were the abductions and murders of three Israeli teenagers, followed by the gruesome abduction and murder of a Palestinian teenager, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat on July 2, by Jewish extremists. The violence raged on even after the Aug. 26 cease-fire that halted hostilities in Gaza, and though things have begun to calm down, 26 Palestinians were arrested just this week. “I see the third intifada started already,” said Jawad Siyam, director of the Wadi Eilweh Information Center, which tracks demonstrations and arrests, using the Arabic shorthand for the waves of violence that plagued Israel in the late 1980s and early 2000s. “We said from the very beginning: It will stop in Gaza but it will continue in East Jerusalem.”

East Jerusalem is as much a concept as it is a specific location. Palestinians claim it as their future capital. Israel captured it from Jordan, along with the West Bank, in 1967, and later annexed some 27 square miles that include about a dozen hilly Palestinian enclaves, and a similar number of Jewish areas that most of the world regards as illegal settlements.

More than 300,000 of Jerusalem’s 830,000 residents are Palestinians. They are not citizens, but get social-welfare benefits from Israel and travel fairly freely. Most boycott municipal elections, but also feel alienated from the Palestinian political leadership; they have complained for years about shortchanged services, including a severe lack of classrooms and slow garbage pickup. The Al Aqsa compound in the Old City has long been the site of sporadic clashes between Muslim and Jewish worshipers — and the troops that try to keep them apart.

These simmering issues seem to be boiling over: The authorities counted 42 “riots” — participants call them protests — on a single night in July. There have been nearly 100 attacks on the light-rail line that snaked through Shuafat and was once seen as a unifying artery; ridership dropped 20 percent this summer. Palestinians report attempted kidnappings, aggression and racist taunts by Jews. Residents of East Jerusalem have demanded that stores replace Israeli yogurt, cheese and juices with Arab-made products, part of a boycott campaign that equates buying Israeli goods with buying Israeli bullets and bombs. Jews who used to get their cars fixed or eat hummus in Arab areas have been staying away.