AFTER more than a week of steadily rising temperatures, Israel and Palestine are aflame. The discovery on June 30th of the bodies of three Jewish teenagers, kidnapped while hitchhiking home from bible college to a settlement south of Jerusalem, was followed two days later by the apparent revenge killing of a Palestinian. Within days, riots that followed the murders had escalated to volleys of rocket fire from Gaza, which have been met by Israeli strikes. As if from nowhere, Israel and Palestine find themselves facing their worst military confrontation since Israel’s “Cast Lead” offensive in Gaza five years ago.

Sirens sounding from the Gaza border to north of Tel Aviv have sent Israelis running for shelter. Militants in Gaza are firing Syrian M-302 rockets, able to reach Haifa, 100 miles (160 kilometres) to the north, according to army officials. More than 200 rockets have landed in Israel. Israel has struck back from the air, sea and land with 780 strikes, reducing buildings in Gazan cities to rubble after calling residents with a few minutes’ notice. When a family climbed on their home’s roof to act as a human shield, the strikes continued, killing seven. Palestinian hospitals say that at least 68 have died so far. Israel’s army has approved the call-up of 40,000 reservists. Its border guard and army are battling dozens of violent protests in Israel’s Palestinian towns and the occupied West Bank.

The escalation has demolished an uneasy peace. Safe behind their walls and the protective umbrella of the Iron Dome anti-missile system, many Israelis had begun to forget about security. Political party leaders focused on economic affairs. Whenever Palestinians were uppity, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, promoted “conflict management”, a euphemism for muddling through.

Suddenly, the centre-right ground that Mr Netanyahu has dominated by tinkering and sidestepping big decisions for five years is slipping from under him. “Mr Netanyahu has lost the greatest asset of his tenure—security and calm,” says Ofer Zalzberg, an Israeli political analyst. “If he doesn’t regain it, he will fall.” The country is polarising between those who want a peace settlement and those who support military action. A poll conducted on July 2nd, as tensions began to bubble over, showed parties on the far-right and left had benefited. The small left-wing party, Meretz, doubled its support.

On July 7th, as the prime minister vacillated, Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister and Mr Netanyahu’s former chief of staff, ended a partnership with the prime minister’s Likud party, taking his ten parliamentarians with him and calling for a heavy offensive against Hamas. Reluctantly, and in part to shore up his right-wing flank, Mr Netanyahu launched a campaign of air strikes the next day, named “Operation Protective Edge”. Public pressure for a ground assault is mounting. “Bibi’s afraid,” says a Tel Aviv bus driver, who flies the colours of his infantry regiment above a swaying fluffy doll pinned in the cabin of his bus.

Mr Netanyahu’s ministers talk confidently of reimposing deterrence on Gaza’s armed Islamists, including the two dominant groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. “Quiet for quiet,” says Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s defence minister. But it may not be that simple. Until a few weeks ago, Israeli generals were congratulating themselves on how much more feeble Hamas had become since its abandonment by Egypt’s new hardline government. Since Abdel Fatah al-Sisi came to power, Egypt’s security co-operation with Israel has reached new levels. Egypt now regards Hamas as a terrorist organisation. Around 95% of the tunnels used to smuggle cars, concrete, fuel, missile parts and more into Gaza and jihadists into Sinai have been shut down by the Egyptian army. Isolated by sanctions, the tunnels were Gaza’s economic lifeline.

In its desperation, Hamas has returned to the battlefield. “Deterrence needs an address,” says an Israeli military analyst. Out of government, Gaza’s guerrillas will be harder to reduce to submission. Some say they relish the prospect of an Israeli reoccupation, which will give them an enemy they can see. And their improved military capabilities—demolition of supply tunnels notwithstanding—have bolstered their standing among alienated segments of the 1.6m Palestinians in Israel, as well as in the West Bank, which is under the partial control of President Mahmoud Abbas.

Mr Abbas’s security forces seem nervous when venturing out of their bases. Though they operate under the umbrella of Israel’s security establishment, they face calls from the street for protection from Israel’s increasingly intrusive army. “Relatives call me a traitor for working here,” says a diplomat in Mr Abbas’s foreign ministry. When one of Mr Abbas’s ministers arrived at the mourning tent for Mohammed Abu Khudeir, the 16-year-old whom religious Jews had allegedly kidnapped and burned alive on July 2nd, mourners chased him away. Mr Abbas’s Palestinian Authority is in danger of becoming a shell.

Leadership of Israel’s Arabs is as parlous. Disconnected from social media, it seems out of the loop. “We are against the chaos, but when I say stop, they don’t listen,” says an Arab parliamentarian, sitting at the calm of his Knesset desk as riots rage in his home town of Um-al Fahm. Protesters have sporadically closed Israel’s highways in the north and south. Masked men throw stones at traffic in the Galilee, where Arabs comprise half the population, and the Bedouin concentrations of the Negev.

Outrage at Mr Abu Khudeir’s murder is the spark; Israel’s assaults in Gaza add fuel. But frustration at their secondary place in a Jewish state provides the firewood. Some Israeli Arabs speak of becoming a new centre of Palestinian gravity as they wage an “economic intifada” to chase foreign investment away. “We want Jews to feel that when Palestinians suffer on the far side of the wall, they pay a price on this side of the wall too,” says a student from the Galilee studying at an Israeli university. For everyone, the ruinous costs are rising.