By Caroline Hawley BBC correspondent in Gaza

At his music store off Palestine Square in Gaza City, Ashraf el-Baz has detected a distinct change in purchasing patterns.

People are just very, very tired

Music shop owner

His stack of intifada-related compilations - among them The Martyrs and The Mortars - are not selling as well as they used to.

"At the beginning of the intifada people were ashamed to come in and ask for anything else," says Mr el-Baz.

"Now, they're not really buying these tapes anymore. People are just very, very tired."

After Israel's devastating military offensive in the West Bank - launched after a spate of suicide bombings - Palestinians are now re-evaluating the tactics of their struggle for statehood.

Yasser Arafat, who has repeatedly bowed to Israeli and international pressure to condemn suicide attacks, recently said the bombings harmed the Palestinians' cause and damaged their dream of statehood.

No constructive focus

That has been the long-held view of Jamal Zakout, of the liberal Feda party.

Many have been deeply traumatised by the confrontation

"By stopping these attacks we strengthen the Israeli peace movement," he says. "Morally I am also against killing civilians. We are the victims of Israeli violence and we must not use their tools."

Mr Zakout and other like-minded politicians have now gathered more than 1,000 signatures to a petition which, among other things, calls for an end to suicide bombings.

A recent opinion poll found that 52% of Palestinians still supported suicide attacks inside Israel - down from 58% a few months earlier.

But 70% of people also backed eventual reconciliation with Israel after peace and statehood.

Many Palestinian intellectuals now blame their leadership for not having channeled the uprising in a more constructive fashion from the beginning.

"There was no clear vision, no strategy for the intifada," says Ziad Abu Amr, a Palestinian MP from Gaza. "Different parties just did exactly what they felt like doing."

Children's dreams

Mr Abu Amr believes there is now a "rising voice for rationalising the methods of the intifada."

But he says much of the future course of Palestinian resistance will depend on Israel.

"When Israel continues with its attacks and incursions and killings, and when there is no political opening, many people feel the urge and the need to retaliate."

If you ask a little child what he wants to be, he doesn't say doctor or engineer, or businessman.. He says he wants to be a martyr

Gaza psychiatrist

The sister of a 12-year-old girl killed by an Israeli tank shell in late May says she now wants to be a suicide bomber.

So does a 22-year-old student, who is fed up with what he calls a "life of humiliation."

"I think martyrdom operations are the only way to victory," says a 25-year-old shop-keeper who distributes sweets when news of an attack reaches Gaza.

"They let up hold our heads up high. No country in the world was liberated except through blood."

Potential timebomb

Liberals worry that it will now be extremely difficult to counter the cult of martyrdom that has developed among many deeply traumatised young Palestinians.

"If you ask a little child what he wants to be, he doesn't say doctor or engineer, or businessman," says Iyad Sarraj, who has studied the phenomenon. "He says he wants to be a martyr."

According to the Gaza-based psychiatrist, suicide bombings have become in the popular perception "the only way left for the average Palestinian to fight for dignity and to get rid of the shame" of a long history of dispossession and ill-treatment.

"Today's suicide bombers are the children of the first intifada," says Sarraj. "It took 10 years of further humiliaton, further suffocation of their lives, further hopelessness for them to become suicide bombers."

And Sarraj worries that there could be worse "horrors" to come from a "future generation of potential martyrs" unless dramatic progress towards peace is made soon.

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