At the end of one of the least vicious weeks of conflict in more than eight months of fighting between Palestinians and Israelis, the United Nations Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, announced yesterday he would fly to the Middle East this coming week, to try and turn the current quasi-ceasefire into a more formal truce and a platform for resuming peace negotiations.
In clashes in the West Bank yesterday, a five-year-old Palestinian boy was seriously injured by Israeli army gunfire near the village of al-Hader, and an Israeli driver was seriously injured when ambushed by Palestinian gunmen near the settlement of Ofra.
There were exchanges of fire and clashes at several other hotspots as well.
But compared to the numerous daily killings that had become the norm between last September, when the Intifada erupted, and last month, when first Israel and then the Palestinian Authority called a ceasefire, the confrontations yesterday, as throughout this week, were markedly less intense.
A week ago, 20 Israelis - mainly teenage immigrants from the former Soviet Union - were killed by a suicide bomber outside a Tel Aviv nightclub, and while it was widely anticipated that Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, would order heavy military strikes at Palestinian Authority installations in retaliation, Mr Sharon's decision to hold fire has presented a diplomatic opening which the Bush administration, various European leaders and, now, Mr Annan, are doing their best to use.
The US peace envoy, Mr William Burns, is back in the region, holding talks with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders. And he said yesterday he regarded the coming week as "crucial" and would spent it trying to "stabilise the ceasefire, and then to move on to implementing the Mitchell report" - the package of proposals, formulated by an international inquiry team led by the former US senator, Mr George Mitchell, designed to get the two sides back to the peace table.
Also holding talks here yesterday was the CIA director, Mr George Tenet, who mediated the highest-level Israeli-Palestinian security talks to be held since Mr Sharon was elected Prime Minister in February.
Although that meeting ended last night without any formal joint statement, it was, perhaps, an indication of progress that Hamas, the radical Islamic group responsible for many suicide bombings inside Israel, feels sufficiently threatened by Mr Tenet's presence to have mounted a demonstration against him yesterday, complete with the burning of his effigy, and a personal denunciation by one of its officials, Mr AbdelAziz al-Rantisi.
"Tenet is trying to turn the struggle into a Palestinian struggle," Mr Rantisi said, "by inciting the Palestinian Authority against its own people, and giving excuses for the Zionist aggressors."
The PA, however, Mr Rantisi added, "will not succumb to pressures".
That assertion, unproven as yet, goes to the very heart of the current precarious lull in violence.
Hours after last Friday's Tel Aviv bombing, the PA President, Mr Yasser Arafat, issued a pledge to work "100 per cent" to prevent further violence - a commitment that, Israel insists, must involve the PA rearresting the Islamic militants who organise the suicide-bombings, many of whom were freed by Mr Arafat from PA jails at the start of this Intifada.