"THIS is a war in every respect." Mr Shimon Peres used the phrase on Sunday after the Jerusalem bus bombing. And yesterday, after another Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up at the Dizengoff Centre shopping arcade in the heart of Tel Aviv, its accuracy seemed incontrovertible.
About 70 people have now been killed in the series of Hamas attacks that began 10 days ago, reducing the Israeli population to a state of panic and despair afraid to travel on the buses or go to the shopping centres, afraid, really, even to leave their homes.
Talk of a "peace process" has become a sick joke the government of Mr Peres and the Palestinian administration of Mr Yasser Arafat are being equally discredited by an unprecedented upsurge in violence which neither, clearly, has any idea of how to thwart.
The ease with which the bombers have murdered their victims has made a mockery of army and police efforts to boost security. Sunday's bus bombing on the same route, at the same hour, as the blast a week earlier deliberately slapped the security forces in the face. Yesterday's bombing was more daring still.
Hamas struck at the very centre of Israel the most crowded shopping arcade in the heart of the most populous city, at mid afternoon on a day when children were off school because of the Jewish holiday of purim. Jerusalem was crawling with policemen and soldiers yesterday, 59 the bombers simply turned their attention to Tel Aviv. And when the bomber saw that troops had been posted at the entrances to the shopping mall, he merely waited at a crossing outside, next to the bank cash machines, and detonated the explosives he was carrying when the crowds around him were at their thickest.
The sad truth is that the Hamas militants uncompromisingly opposed not just to the peace process, but to the very presence of the Jewish state in the heart of what they want to see become an all Muslim Middle East have no incentive to halt the bombings. Quite the reverse.
And for Israelis hoping for a respite, another sad truth is that there is no shortage of impressionable Palestinian youths, their hatred of Israel hardened over the years of occupation, ready and willing to die for the cause of radical Islam.
It is hard to believe that yesterday's attack will be the last bitter evidence of the sheer impossibility of stopping bombers who are happy to give up their own lives to end the lives of their Israeli enemies.
Even to observers hardened by repeated recent exposure to the horrific aftermath of these attacks, yesterday's bomb scene was a devastating sight. Bodies were covered in brown, grey and red blankets where they had landed many of them in the middle of the road.
A single leg, black shoe still attached, lay by a wall outside a bank. Dozens of ambulances ferried screaming, hysterical victims to hospital.
A young child sat up in a hospital bed to describe, shivering with shock, how he and his mother had been crossing the street when "we heard a bang, we saw smoke, and we were thrown face down onto the road. Mummy got up first, and lifted me up, and then they took us to the ambulance."
The awful, inevitable cycle of blast, panic, grisly collection of body parts, rising death toll, angry right wing demonstration, boos for a hapless prime minister visiting the scene, police appeals for calm repeated itself yet again.
And while the relatives of another set of victims prepared to bury their dead, those Israelis fortunate enough to have escaped this random attack sat at home and wondered when and where next the bombers would strike.