For the first time in a fortnight, night fell on the West Bank, Gaza and Israel yesterday without a single death reported. And amid the fragile calm, President Clinton worked the phones to try and bring Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat to a summit, and salvage something from the collapsed seven-year Oslo peace process.
Neither Mr Barak nor Mr Arafat gave any indication of believing that the fighting was over for good.
With violence still flaring intermittently, and reports of a 12year-old Palestinian boy critically wounded by Israeli fire near the Egyptian border, Mr Arafat, in Gaza, was adamant "the clashes are still very bad". And in his contacts with the various foreign diplomats - including the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and the EU security chief, Mr Javier Solana - he reiterated his demand for an international commission of inquiry into the violence, an inquiry he hopes would end with the deployment of international forces.
Mr Barak said a few hours of relative quiet was no proof of anything longer term, but he deferred the idea of inviting the opposition Likud into an emergency government that would symbolise an end to any significant peace moves. And he now appears ready to support a more limited international probe into the violence, with the US in the chair, and the UN, Russia and Norway participating.
While Israel insists Mr Arafat holds the key to Palestinian violence, an armed Fatah group in Nablus held a procession yesterday in apparent defiance of the PA leader: declaring its intention to "liberate" Jerusalem's Al-Aksa mosque, it openly mocked the officials "in the offices" who had achieved nothing.
There are also growing fears of Hamas or Islamic Jihad suicide attack - although Israel would definitely blame Mr Arafat for such incidents, given that he has freed alleged bombing orchestrators in recent days and invited officials from the militant movements to a weekend cabinet meeting.
Meanwhile efforts were continuing, with Mr Annan well to the fore, to broker a deal for the return of three Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah on Saturday. The UN chief said he had information the three "are well and are being well treated".
Mr Barak and his ministers spent much of the day addressing the problem of violence inside Israel; there were widespread clashes between Jews and Arabs on Monday night.
There was one location that bucked this trend. In the West Bank town of Nablus, workers were rebuilding Joseph's Tomb, the holy site from which Israel withdrew its forces at the weekend, only to see it burned and dismantled by a Palestinian mob. But Palestinian officials stressed it would never again be relinquished to Jewish control and while they denied it was now being turned into a mosque, the freshly-painted green dome appeared to tell a different story.