What is unclear is whether the Israelis have accomplished anything beyond that. Even as Israeli officials flooded airwaves Friday to cast the military operation in Ramallah as a defense against future terrorist attacks, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl blew herself up outside a Jerusalem supermarket, killing two Israelis. The next day, a suicide bomber injured at least 32 patrons of a Tel Aviv cafe. On both sides, the whipsaw of violence silenced the cautiously hopeful talk of a prospective cease-fire and possible resumption of the peace process that greeted the return of Zinni to the region last month.

The Israeli invasion came hours after 22 Arab countries endorsed a peace proposal by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah that, for the first time in history, offers Israel normal relations with all Arab states, albeit in exchange for Israel's withdrawal from all territories occupied in the 1967 war and its agreement that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to homes in what is now Israel. But any Arab-Israeli comity created by the Arab League's announcement disintegrated on Friday. Israeli Cabinet members agreed that the Beirut summit was a step toward Arab acceptance of Israel's legitimacy, but the terms of Abdullah's proposal remain unacceptable to Israel: Sharon has no intention of giving back all the occupied territories, and the Israelis reject the idea that Palestinian refugees have the right to return to Israel proper. Moreover, Sharon fumed at the Arabs' failure to condemn the Passover attack.

Arab diplomats interviewed by TIME accused the Israeli Prime Minister of deliberately sabotaging the Arab peace overture with his attack on Arafat. In an interview with TIME, Abdullah called Sharon's assault on Arafat "a brutal, despicable, savage, inhumane and cruel action." He continued, "The acts we are witnessing represent the views of a criminal who has blood on his hands," and he vowed, "Palestinian resistance to the occupation will continue."

So what now? The recent undulations of the conflict have left ordinary Israelis and Palestinians numb with shock and the rest of the world bewildered by a conflict that seems without end. In the frenzy of mortar fire, bombings, hurried press conferences and banner headlines, four key questions emerge:

Why is Israel going after Arafat so aggressively?

Among ordinary Israelis, the clamor to strike back with massive force for last week's Netanya massacre was overwhelming. In recent months, the scale and audacity of Palestinian attacks has steadily climbed, but for sheer barbarism, last Wednesday's assault was unmatched by any other in the 18-month intifadeh. The Hamas bomber timed the attack to kill Jews at the Park Hotel just as they sat down to the seder, a meal that celebrates the liberation of the Jews from the oppression of the biblical Pharaoh. Most of the victims were elderly Israelis. The terrorists plotted the Passover massacre to send a message: no Israeli life is safe, anywhere or anytime.

By the time Sharon's Cabinet met in an emergency session the next night, militants had struck again, killing four Israelis in a settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus. Israeli officials tell TIME that Cabinet ministers agreed at once to hit back militarily, then debated for six hours how to punish Arafat. The Israelis are aware that Arafat cannot completely control Hamas, the Islamic group that carried out the Netanya massacre. But they complain that most of the time he doesn't even try. He has failed to arrest hundreds of militants from Hamas and its sister group, Islamic Jihad, which Israel has specifically identified on lists given to the Palestinian Authority. What's more, the Israelis say, by glorifying killers as "martyrs," Arafat encourages them and puts himself on their side. Anyway, if it is Hamas killing Israelis one day, the next day it is al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Arafat's Fatah political organization that has now overtaken Hamas as the No. 1 instigator of attacks.

The Israelis believe Arafat has been duplicitous in his talks with Zinni over a cease-fire. U.S. officials tell TIME that before the Netanya attack, Zinni had made progress toward a truce. He had asked the two sides to give him lists of conditions they wanted to see in place before they would agree to quit shooting. Early last week Zinni whittled down the two sets of demands into a single "bridging" proposal, which he presented to Sharon and Arafat the day before Passover. According to a senior U.S. State Department official, Zinni told them to make their choice. The Israelis accepted; Arafat, claiming the plan put unfair burdens on the Palestinians, rejected it. After the Netanya massacre, Arafat scrambled to give the impression that he was willing to enter a cease-fire, but no one believed him. Says a senior U.S. official: "I can't say that he's even agreed to implement the Zinni plan."

The Israelis feel they exercised admirable restraint by not attempting to expel or kill Arafat. They also held their fire until the Arab summit had concluded. Sharon aides say the Prime Minister held back from removing Arafat not only on the advice of his commanders but also out of a sense that the Bush Administration doesn't yet want him to take an irrevocable step. "Washington was in the back of his mind," says a Sharon aide.

Will the Israeli strategy stop Palestinian terror?

Even the most hawkish Israeli Cabinet member would say that for the immediate future at least, the answer is no. But the siege of Arafat's headquarters was only the first part of the Israeli army's plan. Military sources tell TIME that the army intends to keep troops in Ramallah searching for wanted gunmen and terrorists for another month. If the deployment there is successful—lots of arrests of Palestinian suspects with minimal Israeli casualties—the army will repeat the exercise in other Palestinian-held cities beginning with Nablus, the sources say. By week's end Israeli tanks had rolled into the West Bank towns of Beit Jala and Beituniya. Israel began to activate 20,000 military reservists to prepare a supply of troops that can step in when the initial assault teams move on.

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