In the last few days Jeremy Bowen of the BBC has been in southern Israel close to the border with Gaza, deep in the West Bank with hard-line Jewish settlers, and seen the funeral of two young Palestinian men killed by the Israeli army in a raid on a refugee camp.
I've spoken to a former Israeli leader in his office in a Tel Aviv high rise, and a senior Palestinian official in his office in a villa in Ramallah. I have heard an Israeli father at a vigil in Tel Aviv describe how his daughter's birthday cake was still in the fridge when his wife and three young children were taken by Hamas gunmen as hostages.
What I have not been able to do is enter Gaza. Only small convoys of aid, and a handful of Israeli combat troops on raids and reconnaissance, have been able to do that.
More Palestinians and Israelis have been killed in the last two and a half weeks or so than in the entire second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, that lasted from 2000 until it petered out around the end of 2004.
Among the different people I've met, Palestinians and Israelis as well as foreigners, I have had a single clear impression. A sense that the grim old routines that have settled on this long conflict since the end of the last intifada have been swept away by the enormity of events since 7 October, and replaced with a fear that what comes next will be even worse.
The occupied Palestinian territories consist of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Israel captured them, along with the Golan Heights which it took from Syria, in the 1967 Middle East war.
It was the most sweeping and rapid victory in Israel's history, achieved in only six days. Coming 19 years after Israel's independence war of 1948, which Palestinians call the catastrophe, or al-Nakba, the 1967 war created the cockpit in which the conflict as it stands today is fought.
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