There's no doubting the sincerity of efforts by the likes of the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, President Clinton and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to prevent the Israeli-Palestinian mini-war deteriorating into a wider, far bloodier conflict.
In an extraordinary interview on Egyptian television on Wednesday, for instance, Mr Mubarak was withering in his criticisms of those - he left them unnamed, but must have been thinking of the rulers of Yemen, Libya and Iraq, among others - who have been calling for the Arab world to go to war against Israel.
"If they're talking about fighting to the last Egyptian soldier," he said angrily, "well, I'm not ready for that."
But time and again in this three-week-old conflict, the best intentions of outside would-be peacemakers are being frustrated by the bitterness, and the readiness to open fire, of the protagonists themselves.
Last week, a brief period of relative calm was shattered by the lynching of two Israeli army reservists in Ramallah police station, and Israel's response with an attack by helicopter gunships on Palestinian Authority installations in Ramallah and Gaza.
Then, on Thursday, the faint hopes that the understandings reached two days earlier at the Annan-Clinton-Mubarak summit, at Sharm al-Sheikh, would yield a truce were similarly shattered, in the hills outside the West Bank city of Nablus.
Despite the initial assertions of some Palestinian officials, whose version of events still holds sway in much of the Arab media, it is clear that the two Israeli soldiers killed last week were not undercover commandos who had sneaked into Palestinian territory, but uniformed reservists who had the fatal misfortune to stray into Ramallah, where mob antagonism sealed their fate.
The unfolding of Thursday's Wild West-style battle outside Nablus is more muddy. Mr Amin Makboul, commander of the Palestinian "Tanzim" paramilitary fighters in Nablus, has insisted that members of a group of settlers opened fire on Palestinian civilians - outside Nablus, and inside Palestinian-controlled territory - sparking the gun battles that ended only after nightfall with the death of one man on either side.
Gen Yitzhak Eitan, the Israeli army's commander for that region, has been equally adamant that the settler group, which included women and children, was shot at by Palestinian gunmen, who then kept them pinned down behind rocks and shrubs all afternoon. The army called up helicopter gunships, but only managed to extricate the scattered members of the tour group after dark.
Typically, each side is accusing the other of having doomed the Sharm understandings. "Settlers are on the rampage," the Palestinian legislator, Dr Hanan Ashrawi, charged yesterday. "And the occupying army is holding our people captive. Stop the live fire. Take away the tanks."
"We are not initiating any confrontations," retorted Gen Eitan.
Tellingly, Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, had, prior to Thursday's gun-battle, appeared on Israeli television several times expressing the hope that the truce would take hold, while Mr Arafat had not issued an explicit, personal call for an end to violence, as promised at Sharm.
And so, for all the efforts of the outside mediators, with another routine day of mayhem yesterday and Israeli army sources hinting darkly at further, imminent "forceful action" in the wake of the Nablus fire-fight, all the tragic elements are again in place for a further, unpredictable intensification of this conflict.