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TEL AVIV — Jews joined the world in anguish at the video broadcast around the globe this week of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy shot to death as he crouched with his father for safety.

It spoke to the horror that befell Israel and the Palestinians this past week as more than 60 died in days of rioting, touched off Sept. 28 when Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a site holy to both Jews and Muslims.

On the cusp of a historic peace agreement, the two nations seem to have flung themselves backward into the strife of the past.

For Israelis, the week's nightmare has been immeasurably exacerbated by other footage of Israeli Arab citizens fighting with, and being shot down by, Israeli Jewish policemen in towns and on roads in the heart of the country.

For the wider world, the distinction between the nearly 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and the 1 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel blurred behind the palls of smoke.

But for Israelis, this week's internal intifada, or uprising, came as a devastating surprise. Never before in its 52-year history has Israel seen such widespread violence.

Jaffa, Haifa, Akko — mixed cities that have known harmony for decades — turned into battlefields.

At the height of the 1987 to 1992 Palestinian intifada, Israeli Arabs, though plainly sympathetic toward the plight and the struggle of their cousins across the border, were always careful to stop short of joining the violence themselves.

This week, the Arab political leadership accused the police in northern Israel of provoking the extreme violence that engulfed their community by resorting far too readily to the use of rubber-coated bullets instead of the nonlethal riot equipment usually deployed by police forces in democratic countries.

In the heat of the rioting, many here feared that the delicate fabric of Jewish-Arab coexistence inside Israel had been irreparably torn apart. The fact that nine Israeli Arabs are lying in fresh graves will not quickly or easily be forgotten by a community that numbers almost 20 percent of the country's total population.

That fact must inevitably cast a pall of uncertainty over Prime Minister Ehud Barak's ability to retain crucial support from the 10 Arab Knesset members. Without that support, he can have no hope of maintaining a narrow-based, center-left government into the Knesset's winter term, which opens at the end of this month.

Urged on by the international community, Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat strove this week to rein in the violence, and even to turn it into a catalyst for resumed peace negotiations.

On Wednesday, they met with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Paris. Reports at press time said the three had agreed to take steps to curb the violence, with Israeli troops withdrawing to positions held before the outbreak and Palestinians agreeing to stay away from two epicenters of violence in the West Bank and Gaza.

Some observers in Israel suggested that in hindsight, the dozens of fatalities and hundreds of injuries might yet be seen as the last blood that needed to be spilled so that the two combatants could finally lay down their arms and make the painful concessions that a peace settlement requires.

Another view, however, was just as cogent. That view holds that the violence will have hardened the hard-liners on both sides and will make it all the more difficult for the two leaders to achieve a workable agreement and secure a solid majority behind it.