Yasser Arafat took temporary leave of Gaza before the US peace envoy, Mr Dennis Ross, departed the region on Monday, writes Michael Jansen.
These days, when the increasingly desperate situation of his people and the problems of peacemaking become too much for him, Mr Arafat escapes to Europe or North Africa or India.
Mr Arafat routinely goes home to Cairo when he is in need of spiritual and physical sustenance. He was born in the Egyptian capital in August 1929, grew up in a lower middle class district not far from the city centre and was educated there. Indeed, he still speaks Egyptian accented Arabic - and English.
Flight does not become the man known as Mr Palestine. He has never been a coward. As an engineering student at Cairo University he took part in demonstrations during the 1940s against Egypt's British overlords, as a young man in the 1960s organised a largely ineffective Palestinian guerrilla campaign against Israel. In 1970 he remained in Amman during the dark days of the Jordan army's military offensive against the Palestinian resistance movement and in 1982 he stayed on in Beirut throughout Israel's air, land and sea bombardment and the Israeli army's encirclement of the city.
Mr Arafat flees these days because he has failed his people. In spite of promises of land and independence, employment and prosperity, democracy and efficient governance given at the time the first Oslo accord was signed in 1993, the peace process has delivered none of these dividends to the Palestinians. While they blame Israel for being squeezed into tight islets of self-rule and for their economic woes, the Palestinians hold Mr Arafat personally responsible for installing an autocratic and corrupt National Authority backed up by a dozen internal intelligence agencies.
Mr Arafat has become just another "Arab dictator" - but one without a country. So far he has maintained his grip on power because he still has the loyalty of Fateh, which he founded in the late 1950s and which remains the largest political party in the West Bank and Gaza. But Fateh's patience is wearing thin. Last summer the Fateh majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council ordered Mr Arafat to dismiss all but two of his 18 ministers for corruption and to sign into law all the measures the Council had adopted since it began work in March 1996. He has not yet complied. As a result Fateh has become increasingly restive.
So far the indigenous Fateh leadership has not made a definitive break with Mr Arafat. But it could if he fails to deliver a substantive Israeli redeployment from the West Bank within the next few months.