A Palestinian girl sits beside a mural of Palestinian militant Leila Khaled at the entrance of her family's home in the Aida refugee camp, ahead of the funeral procession of 13-year-old Abdel Rahman Shadi. Photo: AP

Beirut: An Israeli army watchtower and an imposing concrete security wall dominate the skyline from Bethlehem's Aida refugee camp.

The narrow streets of the overcrowded camp - home to around 4700 Palestinian refugees from areas around Jerusalem and Hebron - have this week once again been scorched by burning tyres and littered with tear gas canisters, sound grenades, rubber bullets and at least one casing from the 0.22-calibre bullets soldiers from the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) fire at its protesters.

It was one of these bullets that killed 13-year-old Abdel Rahman Shadi as he walked home from school through a protest in Aida on Monday, in an incident the IDF has since described as a mistake.

The body of Abdel Rahman Shadi is carried toward the cemetery during his funeral procession at Aida refugee camp, in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem. Photo: AP

That Aida is just one of many flashpoints for clashes between Palestinian protesters and the IDF is a measure of how fragile the security situation is in the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

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A spate of knife attacks perpetrated by young Palestinians against Israelis in Jerusalem, the West Bank and now the Israeli city of Tel Aviv - in which two people died and several more were injured - have elevated tensions further.

For seven days fierce clashes have raged across the occupied West Bank. The Palestinian Red Crescent says hundreds of Palestinians have been injured by Israeli military forces in that time, including over 60 by live fire, in what the United Nations has described as the most serious escalation in violence since June 2014.

An Israeli settler draped in the country's flag stands next to Israeli police in a demonstration at the enterance to the Palestinian village of Beit Sahur, in the occupied West Bank. Photo: Getty Images

For Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former Palestine Liberation Organisation spokeswoman, the upsurge in clashes "feels like the early days of the second intifada, but in very slow motion".

An "aggressive disregard for Palestinian lives" from the Israeli government, coupled with a Palestinian administration that "has never shown any leadership or channelled the energy of its people to challenge the Israeli occupation in a strategic and systematic way", has left young Palestinians without hope, she warns.

The recent escalation in violence is also directly linked to access to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City, says Nathan Thrall, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.

Israeli relatives and friends carry the body of Rabbi Nehemia Lavi at his funeral in Jerusalem. Photo: AP

There is much concern amongst Palestinians about what appears to be a renewed push by right-wing Jewish groups to access the al-Aqsa compound - also known as the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary - despite a long-held status quo agreement, he says.

"A lot of attacks, some Facebook posts and some of the things these people have said before the attacks in the last month or so indicate protecting or defending al-Aqsa has been very high on the list.

"On top of that there is … a general sense of despair, it appears to be the end of the Abbas era but nobody knows what is coming after it … and an acknowledgement that his strategy has failed," Mr Thrall says.

Palestinians roll tyres during clashes with Israeli troops at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah. Photo: AP

For many the focus on al-Aqsa - Islam's third holiest site - is reminiscent of the start of the second intifada.

It was on September 28, 2000, that a visit to the compound - which is also home to the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism - by then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon accompanied by more than 1000 police and security forces sparked a four-year-long Palestinian uprising.

Sharon's visit to the site exploited a political vacuum created by the collapse of negotiations between then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat under the auspices of US president Bill Clinton.

Israeli soldiers drag a wounded Palestinian man away during clashes near the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah. Photo: AP

Now, 15 years later, there is again a strong stench of political failure in the air.

It was exacerbated last week by the speech of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the United Nations General Assembly, in which he declared the Palestinian Authority was no longer bound by the Oslo Accords and yet offered no concrete way out of the current malaise.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the speech as deceitful, warning it "encourages incitement and lawlessness in the Middle East".

A Palestinian holds a sling during clashes with Israeli troops at Qalandia checkpoint in the occupied West Bank. Photo: AP

"How can Israel make peace with a Palestinian partner who refuses even to sit at the negotiating table?" Mr Netanyahu asked when he delivered his UN speech the following day.

On Thursday he announced a ban on Israeli cabinet ministers and legislators from visiting the al-Aqsa compound, later clarifying it applied to Palestinian politicians as well.

Yet while Mr Netanyahu appeared to be taking steps to reduce the tension, the mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, had other ideas.

Israeli settlers scuffle with policemen during a demonstration in the occupied West Bank at the Palestinian village of Beit Sahur. Photo: Getty Images

"The mayor encourages licenced gun owners to carry their weapons to increase security. He himself serves as a personal example of this," an official statement issued by Mr Barkat's office and reported in local media says.

The statement was released after video footage emerged showing the mayor carrying a rifle while visiting an Arab neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem.

At the same time, another video was doing the rounds - this one showing Israeli plainclothes undercover officers infiltrating a West Bank demonstration.

Israeli police provocateurs dressed as Palestinians and Israeli soldiers detain a wounded Palestinian demonstrator during clashes near Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Photo: AP

The officers are seen shooting towards the Palestinian demonstrators with handguns and, at one point, one of the Israeli officers shoots an unarmed Palestinian youth in the leg at point blank range.

While the conservative Jerusalem Post raised the spectre of the "third intifada" and spoke of a "wave of terror", journalist Amira Hass took a different tone in the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper.

"Young Palestinians do not go out to murder Jews because they are Jews, but because we are their occupiers, their torturers, their jailers, the thieves of their land and water, their exilers, the demolishers of their homes, the blockers of their horizon," she wrote.

"Young Palestinians, vengeful and desperate, are willing to lose their lives and cause their families great pain because the enemy they face proves every day that its malice has no limits."

That it has been a deadly week is not in dispute.

On Thursday, Wissam Faraj, 20, was shot in the heart with an explosive, or "dum dum", bullet during an Israeli security raid on Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem.

On Sunday Huthayfa Othman Suleiman, an 18-year-old Palestinian, was killed during clashes with Israeli forces in Tulkarem in the West Bank.

Earlier that day, a 15-year-old Jewish boy was wounded in a knife attack near Jerusalem's Old City - police shot and killed the alleged attacker, Mohannad Halabi, 19, a Palestinian law student at al-Quds University.

On Saturday two Israelis were killed in a knife attack in the Old City. Aharon Bennett, 21, from Beitar Illit, and Nehamia Lavi, 41, a rabbi and member of Ateret Cohanim, a settler organisation that works to create a Jewish majority inside the Old City and east Jerusalem by occupying Palestinians' houses, died in that attack.

And on Friday two Israelis, Eitam Simon Henkin and his wife Naama Henkin, residents of the West Bank settlement of Neria, were killed in front of their children.

Since then there has been a wave of "lone wolf" knife attacks in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the West Bank – but nothing like the groundswell of popular protest that signified the start of the first and second intifadas.

Mr Netanyahu spoke of the work being done to "eradicate this wave of terrorism".

"A significant portion of the attacks are taking place along main roads and we have agreed here on a very serious plan in which we will deploy ground and aerial cameras on all roads in Judea and Samaria [the occupied West Bank], with command and control centres, communication centres and fast response times," he said.

But Israel has done more than secure its roads. Early on Tuesday it moved to demolish the residences of families of those accused of carrying out earlier attacks against Israelis.

The homes belonged to the families of a man who killed four worshippers and a police officer in a Jerusalem synagogue last year, and a second attacker who killed one person when he rammed a bulldozer into traffic.

In both cases the perpetrators were immediately killed by security forces, however Israeli officials have previously told Fairfax Media of the house demolition policy: "Our security services firmly believe . . . that this does act as a deterrent."

According to a statement released by the IDF, Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon issued the directive for the family's homes to be demolished.

Mr Yaalon was the chief of staff of the IDF during the second intifada, in which he said: "The Palestinian threat harbours cancer-like attributes that have to be severed. There are all kinds of solutions to cancer. Some say it's necessary to amputate organs but at the moment I am applying chemotherapy."

As with previous punitive house demolitions, they occurred in the dead of night.

"They raided two houses belonging to the families of Mohammed Jaabis and Ghassan Abu Jamal," said the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. "They obliged their occupants and over 23 neighbouring families to leave their houses while firing sound bombs and tear gas canisters to frighten them and prevent them from approaching the area. Israeli forces then planted explosives inside the two houses and remotely blew them up.

"It should be noted," the centre wrote, "that the 110-square-metre house of Ghassan Abu Jamal used to shelter his wife, Nadia, and their three children, while the house of al-Jaabis is located on the second floor in a two-storey building."

Even so, some Israelis were worried their government was not doing enough to prevent the Palestinian attacks that had claimed four Israeli lives during the week.

Protesters gathered outside the prime minister's residence, calling on the government to secure the roads in the West Bank and to approve more building in West Bank settlements.

Addressing the crowd, settler leader and Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan led the calls for the government to halt the "barbaric freeze" on new settlement construction.

Fairfax Media attempted to contact Mr Dagan, who remains outside Mr Netanyahu's residence in a protest tent, but he did not respond to phone calls, texts or emails.

Mr Abbas, meanwhile, called for calm.

"We don't want a military and security escalation with Israel," he was quoted as saying by the official Palestinian news agency Wafa. "We are telling our security forces, our political movements, that we do not want an escalation, but that we want to protect ourselves."

Yet recent events have proven again that Palestinian lives are cheap in the eyes of Israelis, Ms Buttu says, pointing to the murder of three members of the Dawabshe family who burned to death in their sleep in a firebombing allegedly carried out by Jewish settlers on July 31.

The fire claimed 18-month-old Ali's life as well as his parents, Saad and Reham Dawabshe, and left his four-year-old brother, Ahmad, in critical condition. Hebrew graffiti on the blackened house read "revenge".

"No Israeli settler has been called to account for this crime, we are told Israel knows the perpetrators but is not prepared to reveal them," Ms Buttu says.

"Contrast the massive manhunt that was undertaken to hunt for the killers of the two settlers last Friday."

The UN Security Council expressed grave concern over escalating tensions and called for "the exercise of restraint, refraining from provocative actions and rhetoric, and upholding unchanged the historic status quo at the Haram al-Sharif."