The hand-grenade attack on a crowded Israeli bus station this week highlights the threat the Islamic militant movement, Hamas, poses to any deal that emerges from this week's Israeli-Palestinian peace summit.
But Monday's attack, which wounded 66 people in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, also carries another message.
Some security experts believe it may indicate that the armed wing of Hamas, the Izz el-Deen alQassam Brigades, has been weakened to a point where militants are now incapable of staging deadly suicide bombings deep inside Israel.
The most recent of those was more than a year ago, in September 1997, when three suicide bombers killed four Israelis on a shopping street in Jerusalem.
Since then there have been random shootings, stabbings and smaller explosions, many of them aimed at soldiers and Jewish settlers in the West Bank, which require far less planning and logistical support. All but the Beersheba attack are unclaimed.
The switch has stirred debate about whether Hamas is holding back from a major attack, with its potential to block peace-making, knowing that it would spell a severe assault on its members by an enraged Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat.
The answer to the absence of suicide bombings may lie in the killings this year of three leading militants - including the master bomb-maker, Muhyideen al-Sharif, in March - and a series of arrests by both Israeli and Palestinian forces that have combined to undermine the group's operational capability.
"The fact that they haven't carried out a major attack is not because of any decision against carrying out such actions but their inability to do so," said MajorGen Amos Malka, the head of Israeli military intelligence.
"They are continuing with terror through other means, such as shooting and grenade attacks," sources quoted him as telling a parliamentary committee.
The Beersheba attacker, arrested at the scene, has been named by the Israeli army as Salem Rajab al Sarsour (29), a father of five from the West Bank city of Hebron.
A construction worker and known Islamist, Sarsour has a profile very different from that of suicide bombers - younger, unmarried Palestinians who undergo intensive preparation, both logistical and religious, for kamikaze missions.
Contrary to the accepted wisdom that Hamas times its strikes to derail peace efforts such as this week's US-brokered summit, Sarsour's precise motives beyond trying to kill and maim Israelis appear to have been vague.
According to the army, Sarsour was recruited into Izz el-Deen alQassam only in late August after telling a senior Hamas official in Hebron that he had stabbed to death a rabbi at one of the city's Jewish settler enclaves.
Sarsour was then given five grenades and "instructed . . . to carry out attacks against military and civilian targets" - an order the army said he executed in an assault that wounded 14 soldiers in Hebron on September 30th and then in Beersheba.
Those details, which the army says Sarsour provided under questioning, suggest none of the meticulous planning that Hamas militants put into the suicide bombings that had become their deadly hallmark.
Evidence that Israel has sought to infiltrate Hamas has emerged in the case of the Beersheba attack. The Palestinian Authority has alleged that Sarsour worked for Israeli intelligence.
"I have the documents and proof that his response to the attempt to recruit him was to carry out an attack," the Palestinian preventive security chief in the West Bank told Israeli army radio yesterday.
There was no official Israeli response but some Israeli newspapers yesterday quoted Israeli intelligence officials as saying agents had tried to enlist Sarsour. The reports said Israel had not known until Monday of his involvement in attacks.