An Israeli police officer stands guard near Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque. PHOTOGRAPH BY MAHMOUD ILLEAN / AP

On the night of October 1st, Naama and Eitam Henkin, an Israeli husband and wife, were driving home from an event for alumni of a West Bank yeshiva. Seated in the back of the car were their four young children, ranging in age from nine to six months. A vehicle had been following the Henkins for a few minutes, and as it approached their car its two passengers opened fire. Naama and Eitam were killed on the spot. Their children were spared, but only, according to Israeli reports, by chance: one of the assailants—who were later identified as members of Hamas—accidentally shot the other in the arm, and, in a panic, they fled.

The days that followed have had a sickening sense of repetition: on October 3rd, a Palestinian man wielding a knife killed two Israeli men in the Old City of Jerusalem. A day later, an Israeli teen-ager was stabbed, also in the streets of Jerusalem. Last week, Israelis were stabbed in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, the West Bank, and outside a mall in the city of Petah Tikvah. On Sunday, an Arab-Israeli man rammed a car into two soldiers outside a kibbutz near Haifa, got out of the car, and stabbed three bystanders. On Monday, four more Israelis were stabbed in Jerusalem. Nearly all of the stabbers were killed or wounded by Israeli security forces, whose presence on Israeli streets, particularly in Jerusalem and the West Bank, is always substantial.

Though this wave of violence is new, it wasn’t unexpected: back in March, almost half of Israelis polled said that the prospects of a third Palestinian intifada were either “pretty high” or “very high,” according to statistics from the Israel Democracy Institute. That same month, Israelis awarded Benjamin Netanyahu—who has done nothing, to say the least, to instill hope for a political solution—another term as Prime Minister. A kind of fatalism, or widespread numbness, appears to have gripped the country. Now there are growing concerns that the scattershot stabbings of today may become the suicide bombings of tomorrow. On Sunday, those fears seemed to materialize when a Palestinian woman set off an explosion in a car near Jerusalem, which Israeli police called a botched bombing, wounding a police officer and sustaining injuries herself.

The stated cause of the recent surge in attacks is Palestinians’ belief that the Israeli government is trying to change the status quo at the holy compound in Jerusalem, a place revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. According to security arrangements dating back to 1967, the site, while open to Jewish visitors at specific times, is sealed off to non-Muslim prayer. (I wrote about clashes in the holy compound last year.)

Netanyahu has repeatedly denied trying to bring about a change on the Temple Mount, and seems to mean it: he is fully aware that altering the fragile prayer arrangements in the al-Aqsa Mosque could result not only in a Palestinian conflagration but a full-blown war with the Muslim world. Still, his assurances are belied time and again by members of his own far-right coalition, who ascend the Temple Mount, defy the ban on prayer, and speak of instating Jewish sovereignty and building a Third Temple there. Just last month, Uri Ariel, a settler minister from the nationalist Jewish Home party, visited the holy site and was videotaped praying there. Hamas and its offshoot in Israel, the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, have worsened the situation with false rumors and invidious remarks. Last week, the leader of the Islamic Movement, the radical sheikh Raed Salah, called for a “package of plans” to be “unleashed” on Israel. “May the streets of Jerusalem be purified with the blood of the innocent, who shed it in order to separate from their souls the soldiers of the Israel occupation, and also in the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque,” Raed said in a sermon.

In response to the perceived threats to the holy site, Palestinian protests broke out last week in the West Bank and in Arab cities across Israel. By the end of the week, these demonstrations had reached Gaza, where, Israeli forces said, a large crowd stormed toward the border fence. The Israeli military has responded with fire, killing at least twenty Palestinians since the violence erupted, including a pregnant woman and a toddler, who were hit by an Israeli air strike. “The third intifada is picking up steam not because of a lack of political hope but because of a lack of any kind of hope,” Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s most prominent columnists, wrote last week, in Yediot Aharonot. In an unprecedented move, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat called on city residents with weapon licenses to carry a firearm at all times.

Netanyahu’s assurances regarding the Temple Mount ring hollow to Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas, in his address to the United Nation General Assembly last month, stated that Israel was allowing “extremists” to enter the holy site. Palestinians see an Israeli government that has been hijacked by a radical settler wing, and they know that, just as Netanyahu retroactively approved the illegal construction of West Bank outposts, he might be forced to sign off on changes to the arrangements at the holy site. “Netanyahu continues to be dragged after the settlers’ leadership in the coalition, and is dragging all of us into the abyss,” Ayman Odeh, the leader of Israel's Arab-backed Joint List party, said over the weekend. Amid the wave of violence, Israelis are moving even further to the right than Netanyahu is: in a poll conducted Monday by Israel’s Channel 2, Netanyahu came in third place as the leader most suited to handle the wave of attacks, with only fifteen per cent of the vote. The far-right politicians Avigdor Lieberman, the former foreign minister, and Naftali Bennett, the head of the Jewish Home party, gained twenty-two per cent and seventeen per cent, respectively.

If recent events do lead to a third uprising, Danny Rubinstein, a longtime Israeli reporter on Palestinian affairs, said, it should be known as the “settler intifada”—a violent Palestinian response to settler provocations. “For the first time, there’s no restraining element in the Israeli government,” Rubinstein told me. “The radical elements feel that they are in a position of power. They have an organized agenda. They want to bring about the annexation of Area C”—a reference to the sixty per cent of the West Bank that is under full Israeli control. Annexation of this territory would mean that Palestinian cities like Nablus, Jenin, and Ramallah would become isolated enclaves unable to function independently, and would result, as Rubinstein put it, in “a complete economic shattering.”

Despite growing fears that the recent attacks will spill over into an organized uprising, and despite Abbas’s speech at the U.N., Abbas himself issued a statement to the U.S. State Department that he was continuing efforts to deëscalate the violence, and Israeli security experts believe that he is, in fact, working to prevent another intifada. Some two hundred thousand Palestinians rely on Israel financially, Rubinstein estimated, whether because they work in more than a thousand Israeli factories in the West Bank or because they are employees of the public sector, which receives its money through Israel. “The Palestinian Authority is totally dependent on Israel,” Rubinstein said. Tellingly, Hamas, which has called for a “strengthening and an increasing of the intifada,” has so far largely refrained from firing rockets toward Israeli cities (although a handful were fired over the weekend).