Bereaved Israeli and Palestinian parents met to talk peace yesterday in the Gaza offices of the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, but elsewhere in Gaza, and in the West Bank, violence continued unabated.
Mr Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose son was killed by Hamas Islamic militants six years ago, led the Israeli delegation to Gaza, and urged Mr Arafat to work to put an end to the current violence and return to the negotiating table. He said he would make the same plea in a meeting, scheduled for today, with the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak.
Mr Arafat, in response, said he was seeking a "just, lasting and comprehensive" peace and that Israelis and Palestinians had to learn to live together.
On the ground, however, a rare day without fatalities on Wednesday gave way yesterday to another rise in the death toll. At the Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel, a Palestinian stabbed his Israeli boss, and was shot dead by a second Israeli.
Near the West Bank city of Bourka, Palestinian gunmen opened fire on an Israeli car travelling between two settlements, leaving an Israeli woman and an Israeli soldier, who were among the passengers, badly wounded. The Israeli army is now drastically reinforcing its deployment at the settlements.
A Palestinian "security court", meanwhile, sentenced to death Allan Bani Odeh, convicted of conspiring in the killing of his distant cousin, Ibrahim Bani Odeh, late last month. The dead man, a leading Hamas activist, was blown up in a car that, the court heard, had been booby-trapped by Israel.
After almost 10 weeks of shootings and protests, in which 300 people, most of them Palestinians, have been killed, an international inquiry team headed by the former Northern Ireland negotiator, Senator George Mitchell, is to make a preliminary one-day visit to the region next Monday.
The EU is quietly trying to restart Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic contacts, and Britain and France are formulating proposals for some kind of "international presence" to help restore calm.
Underlining the deepening impact of the violence on Israel's standing in the Arab world, opposition politicians in Jordan are now pushing legislation to urge the kingdom to abrogate its 1994 peace accord with Israel; a theme that is to be reinforced at an opposition demonstration in Amman today.
There have been two attempts on the lives of Israeli diplomats in Jordan, the embassy has become a virtual security bunker, and diplomats' families have now been returned to Israel for their own safety.