The Palestinians and the Israelis had declared that they'd reached a ceasefire. But nobody had told Israel's Arab community. Or if they had heard the news, they plainly didn't care.
The world has become all too accustomed to the scenes of Israeli soldiers clashing with Palestinian stone-throwers and even gunmen, but this week's violence between Israel's security forces and their own people has been unprecedented. And as it continued yesterday, Israeli Jews and Arabs were publicly wondering whether a delicate relationship, now fractured, could ever be healed.
President Clinton has mused that the latest round of killing in the West Bank and Gaza might just serve as "a spur" to catalyse peace efforts. But there are no such crumbs of comfort to be drawn where Israeli Arabs, at least nine of whom have been killed and hundreds more injured, are concerned.
Throughout the day yesterday, the clashes rolled on through Nazareth - the largest Arab town in Israel and only recently a centre point of the Pope's millennial Holy Land visit - and neighbouring towns and villages.
A midday funeral of one of the victims, shot dead by a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli policeman, drew thousands of furious mourners, some of them vowing revenge against the Jews, some waving Palestinian flags, others brandishing the emblems of the local Islamic Movement.
Israel's million Arabs are the people who remained when the state was founded in 1948, cousins and brothers of the Palestinians on the other side of the line. A gradual, fragile relationship has been constructed with the Jewish majority. But this week, says Israeli Arab activist Amir Mahul, "the state of Israel has demonstrated that it is hostile to us. This is a parting of the ways."
Israeli police spokesmen have insisted that they did not overreact in responding to the Arab protests, and that they had to act decisively to quell demonstrations that, for entire days, closed major roads and, for hours, effectively severed northern Israel from the centre.
And some relatively moderate Jewish Israelis are backing them. Yossi Pelled, a centrist politician and former army general, says he is "not prepared to see Israel return to the era of the War of Independence [in 1948], when we had to use the army to open the roads to the Galilee." The police, he said, should use "every means at their disposal" to maintain "our existence here as a state"
Mr Mahul's despondent response is that this kind of behaviour "will just cause massacres". And Israel's Arab Knesset members echo that indignation.
Emerging from a long meeting yesterday with the Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, at which all sorts of promises were made about commissions to investigate the events of the past few days and the introduction of long-promised measures to deal with financial and other inequalities endured by the Arabs, Knesset member Ahmed Tibi was almost speechless in his condemnation of the police.
"We just can't live with nine dead and hundreds injured," he said, asserting that the police were far lighter on the trigger when facing Israeli Arab, rather than Israeli Jewish, protests.
That's become a familiar assertion by Arab leaders here in recent days, and there have been no convincing denials.