It has become a near-monthly event with a predictable pattern – rockets from Gaza are traded for Israeli airstrikes. Palestinians cower in basements while Israelis hide in bomb shelters. Each flare-up signals the threat of full-blown war, but the next day it is usually over.

Israel and Hamas – the Palestinian faction that rules Gaza Strip on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean between Israel and Egypt – have fallen into a bloody and fiery dance over the past year.

In multiple rounds of fighting, neither side has used its full arsenal against the other. Yet both remain in a constant state of on-off conflict, always appearing on the verge of another major conflagration.

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The Israeli military said over the past 12 months it carried out about 900 strikes on Gaza and that Hamas fired more than 1,200 rockets and mortars. During the same period, however, there has not been an Israeli ground incursion into the territory that it occupied from 1967 until 2005.

The latest fighting began on Monday when a post-dawn rocket fired from Gaza obliterated a family home in a neighbourhood north of Tel Aviv. Israel’s formulaic response was to retaliate by decimating buildings across Gaza. In return, militants launched more rockets, which drew yet more Israeli strikes. And then by mid-morning on Tuesday, local media reported, for what felt to many like the umpteenth time, that a “tense calm” had ensued.

For now, however, nobody is breathing a sigh of relief. The most recent battle erupted at the same time as a series of potentially explosive developments converged.

Hamas has faced some of the most public displays of internal dissent since it came to power in 2007. Last week, its security forces violently suppressed rallies by Palestinian residents of Gaza against tax hikes, arresting and beating dozens of people. The group’s critics say its leaders have provoked Israel in the past to distract from its own failings.

Meanwhile, Israel is due to hold elections in two weeks. Several of Benjamin Netanyahu’s more bellicose opponents have used the ongoing Gaza violence to paint the prime minister as being indecisive and weak on security issues.

To refute them, the leader of 13 years has gone to considerable lengths to show he is willing to use violence. “Hamas needs to know that we shall not hesitate to go in [to Gaza] and take all necessary steps,” he warned. The military mobilised brigades to the frontier and drafted reserve forces. And in an apparent show of exceptional force, Israel struck the office of the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh.

Israel’s hawks are not convinced. The far-right politician Naftali Bennett has accused Netanyahu of failing against Hamas and said he would instead “open the gates of hell”.

Even Netanyahu’s main political foe, Benny Gantz, who is considered a centrist in Israel, has played up how in 2014 he flattened whole neighbourhoods in Gaza while serving as army chief during the latest of three wars Israel has fought with Hamas.

The prime minister, however, may view those conflicts as politically costly and militarily ineffective. The last one ended with more than 2,200 Palestinian deaths, more than half of them being civilians, and 73 killed on the Israeli side. Polls show Israelis do not want another war with Hamas.

Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the country’s leading daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, said: “[E]very incursion into Gaza involves a cost in human life and in daily life – a price that is liable to cost him at the polling stations. Netanyahu is in no rush to pull the trigger.”

However, Barnea writes, if Netanyahu does not show a willingness to fight, his “image as the strong man, as Mr Security, which he has been cultivating for years, is liable to collapse”.

Potentially the most incendiary development is that this weekend marks the anniversary of a year-long Palestinian protest along Israel’s frontier with Gaza. Those rallies had hoped to draw attention to a dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where the economy has collapsed under a severe Egyptian-Israeli blockade.

Israeli troops, however, have responded with lethality, killing more than 180 people and shooting 6,100 others in acts the UN says may amount to war crimes.

Hamas, which backs the rallies, is expected to call for thousands to attend on Saturday, while Israel has given no indication it will end its live-fire policy against what it calls “violent riots”.

It was Israel’s use of deadly force against these protests that set the backdrop for the gradual descent into regular battles, several of which kicked off following particularly bloody episodes at the fence.

As the death toll grew, Palestinians began to tie Molotov cocktails and incendiary explosives to kites and balloons that floatef into and burned fields across the fence. A few months ago, Israel started responding to these in the same way it does to rocket attacks: with bombs. In several respects, there is already a low-intensity war.

Many in Israel are calling for restraint. But there are growing cries for harsher, more decisive action.

“Israel cannot afford to remain quiet,” read an editorial in the rightwing Jerusalem Post newspaper on Tuesday. “Deterrence doesn’t come just from strong words, but also from strong action.”