In wretched refugee camps and the chaotic urban sprawl of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians stood defiant yesterday, uncowed by the latest Israeli missiles that escalated a horrible cycle of violence and retribution.
In the West Bank, Israeli combat helicopters fired rockets at two branch offices of PLO Chairman Mr Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation on Monday night - one for each of the two Jews killed earlier in the day - in so-called precision attacks that also struck a neighbouring home in Ramallah and a synagogue of the biblical Samaritan sect in Nablus.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, said the attacks showed the Palestinian leadership that "the long arm of the Israeli army can be even more painful".
Amid the cycle of killing, however, there were the tiniest slivers of hope yesterday.
A midnight meeting was scheduled between Mr Arafat and the last Israeli to retain some measure of trust from the Palestinians, the former prime minister and Nobel Prize-winner, Mr Shimon Peres.
Mr Barak also surprised onlookers yesterday when in a speech he said he had personally spoken by telephone with Mr Arafat last week. But the hawkish sentiments of his message - that he would intensify Israel's responses to attacks on its soldiers and civilians - failed to curb the violence.
And in Gaza yesterday, Israeli troops shot dead one Palestinian teenager and four other men near the Karni border crossing in the east, as the toll for this month of carnage rose to at least 154 people, the vast majority Palestinians. At least 45 Palestinians were reported injured in five separate clashes.
If the Israelis were hoping to harvest panic and submission by unleashing their war arsenal, anger mixed with resignation was the only emotion visible on Sharafa street in Ramallah, where one of Fatah's offices was bombed.
"The Palestinians are not going to bury their people endlessly without the Israelis paying a price," said Marwan Barghouti, the commander of the Fatah militias which have been at the forefront of the protests in the West Bank.
"The Palestinian people have been receiving a lot of missiles and tanks at the same time as they have gone on building bridges with Israel. But now the Palestinians will work in unity, and the Intifada will be more active," Mr Barghouti said.
In Washington today, Israel's acting Foreign Minister, Mr Shlomo Ben-Ami, will further efforts to arrange separate meetings between President Clinton and Mr Arafat and Mr Barak.
But on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank, there was only resignation to a violence that shows no signs of ending.
In the Amari refugee camp, a miserable warren of breeze-block homes, they carted out the computer and other valuables from the Fatah office, fearing another attack.
"This is a trifle. We have offered more than 150 martyrs up to now," said Mr Saher Habash, a member of Fatah's central committee, who picked his way through the rubble. "For us, this is not very important.
"It is a very small office, two tiny rooms and a toilet, but for Mr Barak, it sends a message to the Israeli people: they are bombing the Palestinians."
In Nablus, Mr Abid Muin, a Samaritan priest, said nine of the sect's houses were damaged and a synagogue burnt when the missiles struck. "It is ruined," he said. "But what does it help for me to be angry about a building when all around us people are being killed?"