Israeli snipers in ski masks crouched behind concrete blocks at the check-point between Jerusalem and the Shuafat refugee camp in the West Bank yesterday as young boys, faces masked by scarves, used slingshots to hurl chunks of stone at soldiers hunkered down on rooftops.

Every so often Israeli border police fired teargas or charged their teenage assailants among burning tyres and the cars smashed by a night’s rioting. It may not be the start of the third intifada invoked by Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’s leader in exile, but the simmering hatred was unmistakable.

Inside the West Bank, angry demonstrations flared in support of the bombarded people of Gaza. In the flashpoint village of Naalin, a 22-year-old protester was killed and another man was wounded seriously when Israeli troops opened fire.

The village, near Ramallah, is the site of frequent clashes between Israeli forces and protesters against the huge Israeli security fence being built there.

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It is Hamas’ actions that have precipitated the current, inevitable, crisis

Richard Beeston, Foreign Editor

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In the rundown slum of Shuafat, about 100 masked youths lobbed rocks at Israeli troops, their little brothers smashing paving stones into projectiles for their slingshots.

“Yes, we want a third intifada,” one scrawny 13-year-old enthused. “We’ll fill their bodies with our bullets.” Asked whether they preferred the Islamist movement Hamas, with its doctrine of endless resistance and little offer of hope, or Fatah, which has been conducting fruitless peace talks with Israel for almost two decades, most of the group of would-be fighters squealed: “Hamas, Hamas.”

“Hamas is the only one attacking Israel. They are the only ones who will put bombs in buses,” one said.

At a small demonstration in down-town Ramallah, the capital of the Fatah-led administration in the West Bank, which called on Hamas yesterday to renew its ceasefire with Israel, there was a deep anger born of despondency.

“Israel has open war again,” one young man on al-Manara Square said as about 1,000 people rallied to denounce Israel’s deadly raids. “They talk about peace. We don’t want peace now. We want justice.”

He shrugs at the mention of a third intifada, which followed the uprising of 1987 that led to the 1993 Oslo Accords and the far bloodier 2000 campaign of suicide bombings and riots. This in turn led to Israel storming the West Bank and building a vast barrier inside the Palestinian territory to prevent further attacks.

“It is all the same intifada going on since 1932, when Britain allowed the first [Jewish] immigrants in. It’s all one struggle,” said a 30-year-old man, a documentary film editor who declined to give his name.

There was little sense yesterday of what another bout of widescale violence might achieve, just a gloomy fatalism that peace talks with Israel have led only to an increase in Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

“Palestinian blood is cheap. Nobody thinks we deserve to live, that we are human beings and not animals,” an older man, who identified himself only as al-Massoud, said.

In Gaza there was defiance as a spokesman for the military wing of Hamas dared Israeli forces to enter his domain and engage in street fights with his men on their home turf. “Then we’ll see who the real heroes are,” Abu Ubeida declared.

The Israeli offensive has also sent shock waves through the Jewish state’s own million-strong Arab community, made up of Palestinians who stayed in their homes after Israel was created in 1948. Demonstrations were held in Nazareth, which is normally quiet, and a policeman was injured when rallies turned into riots in the more militant town of Umm El Fahm.

More worrying for Israel, a group calling itself the “Imad Mughniyeh Squads of the Brigades of the Liberators of Galilee”, allegedly made up of Israeli Arabs, threatened to carry out attacks inside Israel.

“The crimes Israel carries out will not be ignored, and the Brigades will answer these crimes [with operations] inside Israel,” it said in a statement to a Palestinian news agency.

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