Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman praised the officers for acting "resolutely and effectively." Naftali Bennett, the economy minister, called Hamdan "a crazed Arab terrorist" and described the police response -- killing him when he posed no threat -- as "what is expected of our security forces."
Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein has ordered the justice ministry's police investigations unit, Mahash, to investigate Hamdan's killing. But the unit is already deeply distrusted by the Palestinian minority.
A recent report by Adalah, a legal centre for the Arab minority, found that Mahash closed 93 percent of the complaints against the police between 2011 and 2013. More disturbing, Adalah found cases were closed even when there was strong evidence of police use of excessive force.
That reflected similar failings by Mahash to properly investigate the police officers responsible for the 13 deaths in October 2000. None were ever indicted, Adalah noted.
The current police chief, Yohanan Danino, pre-empted the current investigation by saying the officers involved not only had his "full backing" but that criticism of them was "unfounded" and "irresponsible."
However, suggestions that Hamdan's killing will ignite a new Intifada, this time in Israel, may prove premature.
Much as in the West Bank and Jerusalem, a sense of hopelessness in the face of Israel's entrenched racism and refusal to make political concessions has built to the point where it has found an outlet in spontaneous protests and outbursts of violence.
But Palestinians are more divided territorially, and their leaders ideologically, than they were at the start of the second Intifada.
Lack of directionIsrael is offering no solutions, which is stoking the anger, but the Palestinian leaderships appear to have no credible answers or plans for how to challenge Israel. That lack of direction is stifling the organised resistance necessary for an Intifada.
Nonetheless, Hamdan's killing and the protests of the past few days mark another milestone in the steadily deteriorating relations between a self-declared Jewish state and its Palestinian citizens.
According to Mohammed Zeidan, director of the Human Rights Association in Nazareth, the emphasis on protecting Israel's Jewishness at all cost is pushing both sides towards ever-greater confrontation.
"That the prime minister [Netanyahu] tells Arab citizens who protest that they should leave for the West Bank sends a message that getting rid of us is a legitimate political option," Zeidan told Al Jazeera.
"Transfer has entered the mainstream, and with it the right to use state violence to solve political problems."
That message has been on prominent display recently in Israel's parliament, the Knesset, where efforts have intensified to eradicate the minority's political parties and representatives.
Earlier this year, the Knesset raised the electoral threshold sufficiently high that none of the Palestinian parties is likely to reach it.
A leading legislator, Haneen Zoabi, has been suspended from the Knesset, for a record six months, for expressing her opinions and is in danger of being put on trial. And Netanyahu has again compared the main Islamic Movement in Israel to ISIL and vowed to outlaw it.
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