Tactics
Unlike the First Intifada, a Palestinian civil uprising mainly focused on mass protests and general strikes, the Second Intifada rapidly turned into an armed conflict between Palestinian militant groups and the Israel Defense Forces. Palestinian tactics focused on Israeli civilians, soldiers, police and other security forces, and methods of attack included suicide bombings, launching rockets and mortars into Israel, kidnapping of both soldiers and civilians, including children, shootings, assassination, stabbings, stonings, and lynchings.

Israeli tactics included curbing Palestinians' movements through the setting up of checkpoints and the enforcement of strict curfews in certain areas. Infrastructural attacks against Palestinian Authority targets such as police and prisons was another method to force the Palestinian Authority to repress the anti-Israeli protests and attacks on Israeli targets .

Palestinians
Militant groups involved in violence include Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. The most lethal Palestinian tactic was the suicide bombing (see List). Conducted as a single or double bombing, suicide bombings were generally conducted against "soft" targets, or "lightly hardened" targets (such as checkpoints) to try to raise the cost of the war to Israelis and demoralize the Israeli society. Most suicide bombing attacks (although not all) targeted civilians, and were conducted in crowded places in Israeli cities, such as public transport, restaurants, shopping malls and markets.

One major development was the use of suicide bombs carried by children. Unlike most suicide bombings, the use of these not only earned condemnation from the United States and from human rights groups such as Amnesty International, but also from many Palestinians and much of the Middle East press. The youngest Palestinian suicide bomber was 16-year-old Issa Bdeir, a high school student from the village of Al Doha, who shocked his friends and family when he blew himself up in a park in Rishon LeZion, killing a teenage boy and an elderly man. The youngest attempted suicide bombing was by a 14-year-old captured by soldiers at the Huwwara checkpoint before managing to do any harm.

Militant groups also waged a high-intensity campaign of guerrilla warfare against Israeli military and civilian targets inside Israel and in the Palestinian Territories, utilizing tactics such as ambushes, sniper attacks, and suicide bombings. Military equipment was mostly imported, while some light arms, hand grenades and explosive belts, assault rifles, and Qassam rockets were indigenously produced. They also increased use of remote-controlled landmines against Israeli armor, a tactic that was highly popular among the poorly armed groups. Car bombs were often used against "lightly hardened" targets such as Israeli armored jeeps and checkpoints. Also, more than 1,500 Palestinian drive-by shootings killed 75 people in only the first year of the Intifada.

In May 2004, Israel Defense minister Shaul Mofaz claimed that United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East's ambulances were used to take the bodies of dead Israeli soldiers in order to prevent the Israel Defense Forces from recovering their dead. Reuters has provided video of healthy armed men entering ambulance with UN markings for transport. UNRWA initially denied that its ambulances carry militants but later reported that the driver was forced to comply with threats from armed men. UNRWA still denies that their ambulances carried body parts of dead Israeli soldiers.

In August 2004, Israel said that an advanced explosives-detection device employed by the IDF at the Hawara checkpoint near Nablus discovered a Palestinian ambulance had transported explosive material.

Some of the Palestinian reaction to Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has consisted of non-violent protest, primarily in and near the village of Bil'in. Groups such as the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement, which works out of Beit Sahour, formally encourage and organize non-violent resistance. Other groups, such as the International Solidarity Movement openly advocate non-violent resistance. Some of these activities are done in cooperation with internationals and Israelis, such as the weekly protests against the Israeli West Bank Barrier carried out in villages like Bi'lin, Biddu and Budrus. This model of resistance has spread to other villages like Beit Sira, Hebron, Saffa, and Ni'lein. During the Israeli re-invasion of Jenin and Nablus, "A Call for a Non-violent Resistance Strategy in Palestine" was issued by two Palestinian Christians in May 2002.

Non-violent tactics have sometimes been met with Israeli military force. For example, Amnesty International notes that "10-year-old Naji Abu Qamer, 11-year-old Mubarak Salim al-Hashash and 13-year-old Mahmoud Tariq Mansour were among eight unarmed demonstrators killed in the early afternoon of May 19, 2004 in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, when the Israeli army open fire on a non-violent demonstration with tank shells and a missile launched from a helicopter gunship. Dozens of other unarmed demonstrators were wounded in the attack." According to Israeli army and government officials, the tanks shelled a nearby empty building and a helicopter fired a missile in a nearby open space in order to deter the demonstrators from proceeding towards Israeli army positions.

Israel

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) countered Palestinian attacks with incursions against militant targets into the West Bank and Gaza Strip, adopting highly effective urban combat tactics. The IDF stressed the safety of their troops, using such heavily armored equipment as the Merkava heavy tank and armored personnel carriers, and carried out airstrikes with various military aircraft including F-16s, drone aircraft and helicopter gunships to strike militant targets. Much of the ground fighting was conducted house-to-house by well-armed and well-trained infantry. Due to its superior training, equipment, and numbers, the IDF had the upper hand during street fighting. Palestinian armed groups suffered heavy losses during combat, but the operations were often criticized internationally due to the civilian casualties often caused. Palestinian metalworking shops and other business facilities suspected by Israel of being used to manufacture weapons were regularly targeted by airstrikes, as well as Gaza Strip smuggling tunnels.

Israeli Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozers were routinely employed to detonate booby traps and IEDs, to demolish houses along the border with Egypt that were used for shooting at Israeli troops, to create "buffer zones", and to support military operations in the West Bank. Until February 2005, Israel had in place a policy to demolish the family homes of suicide bombers after giving them a notice to evacuate. Due to the considerable number of Palestinians living in single homes, the large quantity of homes destroyed, and collateral damage from home demolitions, it became an increasingly controversial tactic. Families began providing timely information to Israeli forces regarding suicide bombing activities in order to prevent the demolition of their homes, although families doing so risked being executed or otherwise punished for collaboration, either by the Palestinian Authority or extrajudicially by Palestinian militants. The IDF committee studying the issue recommended ending the practice because the policy was not effective enough to justify its costs to Israel's image internationally and the backlash it created among Palestinians.

With complete ground and air superiority, mass arrests were regularly conducted by Israeli military and police forces; at any given time, there were about 6,000 Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli prisons, about half of them held temporarily without a final indictment, in accordance with Israeli law.

The tactic of military "curfew" – long-term lockdown of civilian areas – was used extensively by Israel throughout the Intifada. The longest curfew was in Nablus, which was kept under curfew for over 100 consecutive days, with generally under two hours per day allowed for people to get food or conduct other business.

Security checkpoints and roadblocks were erected inside and between Palestinian cities, subjecting all people and vehicles to security inspection for free passage. Israel defended those checkpoints as being necessary to stop militants and limit the ability to move weapons around. However some Palestinian, Israeli and International observers and organizations have criticized the checkpoints as excessive, humiliating, and a major cause of the humanitarian situation in the Occupied Territories. Transit could be delayed by several hours, depending on the security situation in Israel. Sniper towers were used extensively in the Gaza Strip before the Israeli pullout.

The Israeli intelligence services Shin Bet and Mossad penetrated Palestinian militant organizations by relying on moles and sources within armed groups, tapping communication lines, and aerial reconnaissance. The intelligence gathered allowed the IDF, Israel Border Police, and Israel Police, including Yamam and Mistaravim special forces units, to thwart hundreds of planned suicide bombings. The intelligence gathered also helped create a list of Palestinians marked for targeted killings.

Israel extensively used targeted killings, the assassinations of Palestinians involved in organizing attacks against Israelis, to eliminate imminent threats and to deter others from following suit, relying primarily on airstrikes and covert operations by Shin Bet to carry them out. The strategy of targeted killings had been proposed by Shin Bet, which determined that while it was impossible to stop every single suicide bomber, suicide bombings could be stopped by directly attacking the conspiratorial infrastructure behind them by killing operational commanders, recruiters, couriers, weapons procurers, maintainers of safehouses, and smugglers of money which financed the bombings. Israel was criticized for the use of helicopter gunships in urban assassinations, which often resulted in civilian casualties. Israel criticized what it described as a practice of militant leaders hiding among civilians in densely populated areas, thus turning them into unwitting human shields. Throughout the Intifada, the Palestinian leadership suffered heavy losses through targeted killings.

The practice has been widely condemned as extrajudicial executions by the international community, while the Israeli High Court ruled that it is a legitimate measure of self-defense against terrorism. Many criticize the targeted killings for placing civilians at risk, though its supporters believe it reduces civilian casualties on both sides.

In response to repeated rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip, the Israeli Navy imposed a maritime blockade on the area. Israel also sealed the border and closed Gaza's airspace in coordination with Egypt, and subjected all humanitarian supplies entering the Strip to security inspection before transferring them through land crossings. Construction materials were declared banned due to their possible use to build bunkers. The blockade has been internationally criticized as a form of "collective punishment" against Gaza's civilian population.

Although Israel's tactics also have been condemned internationally, Israel insists they are vital for security reasons in order to thwart terrorist attacks. Some cite figures, such as those published in Haaretz newspaper, to prove the effectiveness of these methods (Graph 1: Thwarted attacks (yellow) vs successful attacks (red) – Graph 2: Suicide bombing within the "green line" per quarter).

国際社会の関与

国際社会は長らくパレスチナ問題に関与しており、第2次インティファーダが勃発してからもひたすら拡大している。現在のイスラエルは、アメリカ合衆国から軍事支援として毎年30億ドルを融資保障なしに受けており、産業国家として発展しつつも、1976年以降、アメリカ合衆国による毎年の外国への支援で最大の規模を保っていて、かつ、唯一、用途の報告義務が存在しない。パレスチナ自治政府は、アメリカ合衆国からの軍事支援として毎年1億ドル、世界の財政支援として20億ドルを受けており、その中にはアラブ連盟からの5億2600万ドル、欧州連合からの6億5100万ドル、アメリカ合衆国からの3億ドル、世界銀行からの約2億3800万ドルが含まれる。