Israeli military planners must have thought they had achieved a great success yesterday after an army combat helicopter fired three missiles at a Hamas office in the West Bank town of Nablus and killed six members of the militant Islamic movement, including two of its senior activists. In the strike, two children were also killed - brothers aged eight and 10.
Hamas swiftly vowed revenge, with the movement's spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, saying Israel would be made to "pay for the bloodshed". If the laws governing the 10-month tit-for-tat conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians remain consistent, that response will not be long in coming.
Even before the attack yesterday, Israel's army chief was talking about "unprecedented" warnings of terror attacks, hundreds of police and soldiers were being deployed at locations around Jerusalem, and security patrols along Israel's border with the West Bank were being strengthened.
But Israel's efforts to seal the occupied territories in an effort to keep Palestinian suicide bombers at bay have never fully succeeded. And if the army won a round in its ongoing battle with the militant Palestinian organisations yesterday, this low-grade war of attrition has proved that there are no knockout blows.
The policy of targeting Palestinian militants was instituted by former Israeli prime minister Mr Ehud Barak, and as one Israeli defence analyst puts it, was meant to send a message to the Palestinians involved in attacks inside Israel "that you can run but you can't hide". In most cases, Israel has not taken responsibility for targeted hits on militants, but Palestinians say some 50 have been assassinated in the last 10 months.
The "liquidation" policy was initiated by Mr Barak about two months into the intifada uprising, after Israeli aerial bombing raids over Gaza and the West Bank failed to extinguish the violence.
The policy, continued by the Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, has struck fear into the hearts of Palestinian militants.
But the hits have not extinguished the violence and have drawn criticism from world leaders, including the administration of President Bush, which has generally tended to be more critical of Mr Arafat than Mr Sharon.
Israeli Minister Ephraim Sneh, of the centre-left Labour Party, said yesterday that the list of safety measures for militants was an indication that the government's policy in battling Palestinian violence was proving effective. "These people are first and foremost concerned about their own personal safety," he said yesterday. "This is our aim - to put the other side on the defensive."
However, as Mr Sneh has regularly stressed, whatever the number of Palestinian militants Israel succeeds in assassinating, ultimately there is only one way to extinguish the conflict fully, and that is for the two sides to sit down around the negotiating table.