text: The video above, a two-minute clip published on Wednesday by Agence France-Presse, captured an altercation in the West Bank between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security personnel. The video shows a group of perhaps eight Israeli undercover cops, garbed in Palestinian keffiyehs, standing among a crowd of other Palestinians.
  
  They appear to be hurling rocks at Israeli security forces down the road near Beit El, an Israeli settlement outside the city of Ramallah. Then, suddenly, the undercover cops turn on the protesters, draw guns, and beat up a handful of Palestinian youth. One Palestinian male, in particular, receives an endless torrent of kicks and punches from both the undercover cops and Israeli soldiers. Accounts from observers, including the Jerusalem bureau chief of Reuters, indicated that the Israeli undercover operatives had possibly instigated the clashes with the security personnel, who later came rushing down and aided in the arrests of a number of Palestinians.
  
  Footage in Ramallah shows undercover #Israeli police throwing stones at Israeli forces and inciting #Palestinian youth to do the same
  
  — Luke Baker (@LukeReuters) October 7, 2015
  
  Footage uploaded by the Shehab News Agency of the same incident appeared to show at least one Israeli police officer discharge a gun at point-blank range into the leg of a Palestinian protester already lying prone on the ground.
  
  According to Ma'an News Agency, a Palestinian news service, 18 Palestinian youth were injured by rubber-steel bullets amid clashes in the environs of Ramallah on Wednesday. An Israeli army spokesman told the news agency that its forces responded to rock-hurling and molotov cocktail-throwing "instigators with live fire."
  
  As my colleague William Booth reported earlier, the violence is part of a series of clashes that have gripped parts of Israel and the West Bank, as tensions soar between Israelis and Palestinians. Three separate lone-wolf knife attacks carried out by Palestinians on Jewish Israelis also took place on Wednesday.
  
  The escalation was dubbed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as "a wave of terror," though Israeli opposition groups criticized the Israeli leader for being unable to deal with the rising animosities. The current turmoil is just the latest articulation of the dire state of the collapsed peace process between Israel and its Palestinian interlocutors. Settlements like Beit El are considered illegal under international law and are frequent flash points where Palestinians protest what they see as their dispossession by the Israeli state.
  
  The beleaguered Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called for calm, stressed his opposition to violence and his support for "a popular, nonviolent struggle" for Palestinian rights.
  
  According to Booth, the Palestinian Red Crescent reported that 970 Palestinians have been injured in clashes with Israeli security forces since Saturday, including 66 people who were shot.
  
  This viral video of an Israeli soldier trying to arrest a Palestinian boy says a lot
  
  The death of the two-state solution
  
  Does Netanyahu really believe in a separate Palestinian state?
  
  Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at TIME, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.
summary: It's the latest snapshot of an escalation of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.