Israel's hardline opposition politicians believe that today will see the beginning of the end of Mr Ehud Barak's coalition government, and that, led by the former prime minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, they will be back in power by next spring.
The Israeli Knesset is today to hold the first reading of a Bill calling for the dissolution of parliament and new elections. And the legislation's sponsors, from Mr Netanyahu's rightwing Likud party, are confident that they can muster the necessary majority to pass the Bill.
The legislation would still require a second and third reading, but success today would set in motion "the dynamic for early elections", said Likud Knesset member, Mr Silvan Shalom.
Once rolling, most analysts believe, the election snowball would be hard to stop.
Mr Barak defeated the incumbent Mr Netanyahu by a 56 to 44 per cent margin in elections in May 1999, but his political star has waned dramatically since then.
Critically, he placed central emphasis on the attempt to reach a permanent peace agreement with the Palestinians, an attempt that ended in conspicuous failure at this summer's Camp David peace summit.
Since then the notion of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation has been swept aside by the past two months of daily confrontation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Some 280 people have been killed in the violence to date, the overwhelming majority of them Palestinians. Overnight on Sunday, five more Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli soldiers near Kalkilyah in the West Bank.
The men were armed members of Mr Yasser Arafat's Fatah military wing, Israeli officials said, who had opened fire on an Israeli civilian vehicle. Not so, countered Palestinian officials, who said the men were unarmed and that the army's attack on them was unprovoked.
Discredited on the Israeli left for the failure to reach an accord with Mr Arafat, and criticised on the right for offering overly generous peace terms and for what they perceive as a "weak" response to the current fighting, Mr Barak has few remaining friends in parliament.
Even senior members of his own party were yesterday publicly at odds with him, with the former prime minister, Mr Shimon Peres, complaining bitterly that Mr Barak was refusing to let him meet with Mr Arafat to try and help restore a modicum of calm to Gaza and the West Bank.
Opinion polls suggest that Mr Netanyahu would easily defeat Mr Barak were elections held in the near future, despite the fact that Mr Netanyahu no longer even heads the Likud.
That position is held by Mr Ariel Sharon, the former general whose visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem two months ago sparked the descent into Israeli-Palestinian confrontation.
During his 1996-1999 premiership, Mr Netanyahu slowed the process of peacemaking with the Palestinians and championed the expansion of Jewish settlements in the territories.
Now presenting a gentle, more conciliatory image than previously, he has nevertheless been critical of purported political constraints placed by Mr Barak on the Israeli army in handing the current conflict.
In an interview last weekend, Mr Netanyahu said that he would have bombed the Palestinian casino at Jericho in immediate response to Palestinian shooting attacks on Jerusalem's Giloh neighbourhood.
Ironically, Mr Barak's best hope of avoiding early elections would be to forge a "national unity" alliance with Mr Sharon's Likud.
Mr Sharon stands to gain from such an alliance, since he would be likely to receive a senior cabinet post. Were early elections to be called, by contrast, Mr Netanyahu would quickly wrest the party leadership from him.
AFP adds: Israel intensified its settlement activity in the occupied territories in October, the first full month of the Palestinian uprising, by increasing land sales, a left-wing MP said yesterday.
"The lands administration sold 607 parcels of land for construction in the settlements during the month of October," Mr Mossi Raz, an MP with the leftwing Meretz party said, citing official figures.
He said that since the start of the year, 2,700 plots of land had been sold for Jewish settlements at an average monthly rate of around 250," he added.
"This is a grave error by the government, which should on the contrary be freezing construction," he said.