ASKAR REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank — Sawsan Abu Hashieh said she packed a bag of clothing on Sunday for her 18-year-old son, Nur al-Din, who told her he planned to sneak into Israel to work for two weeks. Instead, he was arrested in Monday’s fatal stabbing of a soldier near a crowded Tel Aviv train station.

Though relatives insisted that Mr. Abu Hashieh was uninterested in politics, youths in the graffiti-pocked alleys of this Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus revealed a different side. Calling up his Facebook page on their smartphones, they showed a photo of him at a protest, holding a placard that said: “We are people who love death while our enemies love life.”

“He is not a member of any faction,” said Fares Rifai, 24. “But he supports the armed struggle.”

Mr. Abu Hashieh, who became a heroic figure to Askar’s young people overnight, is a militant in what many Palestinians see as a new kind of armed struggle, a leaderless uprising of sporadic outbursts against the Israeli occupation and policies. With no peace process to speak of and a political leadership that lacks the public’s confidence, Palestinians described the emergence of a smoldering, improvised intifada unlike the organized suicide bombings of a decade ago or the stone-throwing protests of the late 1980s.

The violence, rarely condemned, is at least tacitly condoned by Palestinian leaders and is encouraged by cultural memes like a song called “Run Over the Settler” that has circulated along with similarly themed cartoons on social media in recent days.