A mass shooting in Israel left two people dead and at least 15 others wounded last night — and doesn’t appear to be an isolated incident. The attack in Tel Aviv is the fourth deadly event in three weeks that appears tied to terrorism, and raises questions as to whether Palestinians are attempting yet another intifada as Sunni nations begin aligning with Israel:

MASS SHOOTING IN TEL AVIV: Security forces in Israel killed a Palestinian man they say opened fire on a busy street in Tel Aviv, killing two people and wounding 12 others. pic.twitter.com/YPGemGcuS4

— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) April 8, 2022

NBC has the details on the latest attack:

Two people were killed and at least 15 others were wounded Thursday night in a shooting at a bar in Tel Aviv, authorities said.

A person called a terrorist who is thought to have carried out the attack was later found and killed in an exchange of gunfire with police forces, Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet said.

The dead man was identified as Raed Hazem, 28, of Jenin. Shin Bet said he was killed after being found near a mosque in Jaffa.

The shooting at the bar occurred shortly after 9 p.m., Tel Aviv police said. The bar is in a busy restaurant and nightlife district in central Tel Aviv.

Was this the act of a so-called lone wolf or part of a coordinated strategy that has patterns going back decades? No one knows yet for sure, but the reaction from Hamas certainly leaves the impression that it’s the latter:

Islamic Palestinian militant group Hamas has not claimed responsibility for the attack, but senior Hamas official Mushir al-Masri said that “resistance operations are a natural response to Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people,” according to The Times of Israel, which added that Hamas officials celebrated the attack. The news outlet reported that masked men in Ramallah were seen handing out candy after the incident, a common act of celebration.

The attack is the latest in what Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and observers have called a “wave of terror,” which the ministry says has been going on since September 2015. Just in the past few weeks, a Palestinian gunman killed five people in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak and a reported terrorist stabbed four people in a shopping mall in Beersheba.

The recent run-up of deadly attacks on civilians in Israel suggests something more significant than business as usual. Hamas’ celebration also suggests that it’s planned and coordinated to some degree. Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett must think so too, as he has ordered security agencies to take a maximum range of operations to quell the violence, promising “thousands” of arrests if necessary:

“There are not and will not be limits for this war,” Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said, speaking hours after the attack in Tel Aviv.

“We are granting full freedom of action to the army, the Shin Bet (the domestic security agency) and all security forces in order to defeat the terror,” he added, in a public address in the Israeli coastal city. …

Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz, speaking alongside Bennett, said officers had made “around 200 arrests”, adding that “if necessary there will be thousands.”

Why start up another intifada now? The endurance of the Abraham Accords even after Joe Biden’s takeover of foreign policy has to worry Hamas as well as Fatah, for one thing. They’re about to lose access to a lot of wealth in the region, not to mention leverage. The Saudis have been sending up warning signals on this ever since at least October 2020, when Prince Bandar bin Sultan blew the lid off of Saudi exhaustion with the Palestinians and their leadership. With the new wake-up call from Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan seems eager to reconcile with Israel and his NATO allies all over again. The Palestinians might be left with no one but Iran on their side, unless they can get the attention of Joe Biden off of Putin and back onto their ambitions to wipe Israel off the map.

It’s basically the Kim Jong-un strategy — make trouble when the world is distracted to avoid getting lost in the shuffle. In this case, as in the past, it’s going to backfire in a hardening of opposition to Palestinian causes in the West. Hamas may be high-fiving today, but they’re tying the hands of Palestinians in the long run.