The Palestinian suicide bombers are striking with greater frequency than ever before - three attacks alone between Saturday night and yesterday morning. The Israeli army is concentrating forces outside more and more Palestinian cities.
Mr Yasser Arafat, confined with a few dozen others for the third day to a few rooms in his decimated Ramallah headquarters complex, is vowing not to surrender and calling for international intervention.
Mr Ariel Sharon, in a brief TV address to his nation last night, is pledging that nothing will prevent him from "rooting out terrorism at its source", and branding Mr Arafat the source.
Arab reaction is growing heated. And the Bush administration, the one power with the leverage to drag Israel and the Palestinians apart, and prevent what might soon become unstoppable momentum toward a regional confrontation is, for now, watching and waiting.
Aides to Mr Sharon had said, when the army was ordered into Ramallah following last Wednesday's suicide-bombing at a Netanya hotel, that their declared objective of "dismantling the terrorist infrastructure" thriving in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would take time to achieve.
And despite unprecedented security precautions at virtually every public gathering place in Israel, bombers from Mr Arafat's own Fatah faction and from Hamas found their way across Israel's unfenced border with the West Bank to devastating effect on Saturday and again yesterday.
A Fatah suicide-bombing of a café in downtown Tel Aviv on Saturday night left 25 Israelis injured, one of them critically.
A Hamas bomber's attack on a packed restaurant in Haifa yesterday was far bloodier - killing at least 16 Israelis.
Underlining the indiscriminate nature of these attacks, the restaurant that was targeted - and that had its roof blown through and its interior wrecked - is Arab-owned, and many of the dead and injured were Israeli Arabs.
"I thought, thank God, today there is some work," said Mr Abdullah Adawi, a relative of the owner, speaking from his hospital bed about the hours before the blast, when the restaurant was doing rare brisk business. "Then I was on the floor, caught up in electrical wires, things falling on me. I don't know how I got out alive."
Other survivors said the blast had been huge, even by recent standards, sending body parts flying and setting people aflame. Later yesterday, yet another bomber blew himself up at the West Bank settlement of Efrat, south of Jerusalem, injuring four more Israelis.
Mr Sharon, in his address last night, insisted that, far from wanting to thwart such attacks, Mr Arafat incites and initiates them.
Mr Arafat - looking buoyed to have got the electricity back in his offices and to have been visited by a few dozen international supporters - was adamant that he is committed to "the peace of the brave".
His comments yesterday showed a man regaining confidence after the bitter weekend surprise that saw Israeli tanks converge on his doorstep; on Saturday he had told Al-Jazeera television that the death of the Netanya bomber was the kind of martyr's end to which he aspired, and had committed the cardinal sin of ranting down the phone to CNN's Christiane Amanpour and then cutting her off.
Before his cabinet voted overnight on Thursday to "isolate" but not "harm" Mr Arafat, Mr Sharon had sought but failed to win his colleagues' support for the idea of arresting the Palestinian leader and putting him on the next plane out. Quite what Mr Sharon intends to do with his nemesis now is unclear.
Mr Arafat is entirely disinclined to surrender. Mr Abdullah Shami, the leader of the Islamic Jihad extremist group, yesterday suggested he should be as good as his word and "ascend to the level of the martyrs for the sake of the Palestinian nation".
But Mr Arafat seems disinclined to do that either, instead apparently waiting for threats from Arab states, or American intervention, to force an Israeli retreat and set him free.
Thus far, though, direct Arab intervention amounts to a telephone protest call to Mr Sharon from the king of Morocco.
There have been demonstrations in the two Arab capitals Israel watches most acutely - Cairo and Amman - and threats of diplomatic consequences from the respective governments, the only two with full peace treaties with Israel. But Mr Sharon is unlikely to be much moved by what he would consider mild sabre-rattling.
Critically, the Bush Administration, though it has supported a UN Security Council call for an Israeli withdrawal, is evidently not pressing Israel to make that withdrawal immediate.
On Saturday, President Bush had indicated a fair degree of latitude for Mr Sharon, saying that he "fully" understood "Israel's need to defend herself".
Mr Ran Cohen, one of the leaders of the leftist Meretz opposition party, last night complained that Mr Sharon had failed to tell the public "where this will end".
But with even Mr Shimon Peres, the Foreign Minister who shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr Arafat, standing fairly solidly by Mr Sharon's side, and with few Israelis inclined to question a military response to so incessant a tide of bombings, there is, in fact, no end in sight.