Unusually for bomber-wary Jerusalem, the streets of the city centre were filled for a few hours yesterday, as the first gay and lesbian pride parade here attracted a crowd of 4,000 people.
Even more unusual, given the wider climate of hostility, the marchers brandished placards written in Hebrew, English and Arabic, prayers were read in all three languages too, and the black balloons released in honour of the victims of 20 months of daily conflict were intended to remember both Jewish and Arab casualties.
Away from that small flash of colour and shared sorrow, however, the bitterness and the violence continued. At Ofra, a Jewish settlement half an hour north of Jerusalem, the body of Erez Pund, shot dead by a Palestinian gunman in the West Bank on Thursday, was laid to rest. Aged 18 and in his final year at school, Mr Pund was the settlement's sixth intifada fatality. Mourners said defiantly they will name a new neighbourhood after him.
In what have become daily incursions into Palestinian cities, meanwhile, Israeli troops imposed a curfew in Jenin - origin of the suicide bomber who killed 17 Israelis when he detonated a car-bomb next to a bus on Wednesday - and made house-to-house searches. They also briefly entered Tulkarmand arrested a woman, who they said had been poised to carry out another bombing.
On Thursday, the army, operating in Ramallah, shelled the living quarters of Mr Yasser Arafat, prompting the Palestinian Authority president, who was out at the time, to declare the international community had to put a stop to "this fascism, this Nazism, this dirty work against our people".
A White House spokesman acknowledged that the US was unaware of the purpose of Thursday's action, although he was not critical of it. An aide to Israel's Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon, however, explained it had been designed to "send him a message": Mr Arafat should either thwart the attacks or stand aside in favour of a Palestinian leader who would do so.
Israel is also blaming Syria for Wednesday's bombing, since Islamic Jihad, the group which dispatched the teenage bomber, has its headquarters in Damascus.
The Israeli chief-of-staff, visiting the wounded from Wednesday, reiterated his demand that Mr Arafat be deported - a move that Mr Sharon has contemplated and will likely discuss with President Bush when he visits the White House on Monday.
Mr Bush is hosting President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt this weekend. Far from encouraging the ousting of Mr Arafat, he wants the US to fix a firm timetable for the declaration of Palestinian statehood next year - after elections and a radical reform of the Palestinian Authority. An accelerated process towards Palestinian independence, the Egyptian president said yesterday, represented the only means to halt the bombings.
But the Bush administration is still agonising about when and even whether to set out a detailed blueprint for progress toward Palestinian statehood, uncertain whether to make use of a tentatively planned international conference next month.
A State Department draft reportedly envisages a three-year process centred - the Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, said - around the idea of the Palestinians "giving up on the right of return (for refugees to sovereign Israel), in exchange for Israel giving up on all the settlements".
According to Israeli and Palestinian public opinion surveys yesterday, only 22 per cent of Israelis and 24 per cent of Palestinians said they backed the Saudi peace initiative, which calls on Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders.