Just before dusk yesterday, four Israeli helicopters clattered in from the sea to the west of the Gaza Strip, and began firing missiles at the hangars alongside Mr Yasser Arafat's presidential compound in central Gaza City, destroying two of the Palestinian President's personal helicopters, his landing pad, and various fuel and equipment stores.
It was not an attempted attack on Mr Arafat himself, stressed a spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon. Indeed, the Palestinian leader, as was well known, has been in Ramallah for the past few days, more than an hour's drive away across Israel in the West Bank. Rather, said the spokesman, it was a "symbolic" strike.
But symbolic of what? Even as Mr Arafat's rotor blades were burning, Mr Sharon's aides were asserting that it did not symbolise an Israeli government desire to return the Palestinian president to his pre-peace-process exile in Tunisia. Nor, the aides declared, was Israel signalling its intention to destroy the Palestinian Authority.
The Gaza strike, said the spokesman, was designed to convey to Mr Arafat that "either he fights terrorism, or we will have to do it ourselves".
This sounded somewhat disingenuous, given Mr Sharon's very public lack of trust in Mr Arafat - his continual assertions, restated at his press conference last night, that the Palestinian leader has chosen "a strategy of terrorism" and "has not taken a single step" to thwart attacks.
It also seemed counter-productive. If Israel still nurtures any faint hope that Mr Arafat will employ his numerous security networks to raid the Hamas and Islamic Jihad bomb factories, intervene to prevent the training and indoctrination of suicide bombers, and hold key militants in his jails for extended periods, surely the last thing it would want to do, even symbolically, is limit his ability to move freely around the territory it wants him to control.
So it may be that last night's Gaza strike is a harbinger of much heavier action to follow - a first step that, despite the aides' assurances, will eventually lead to the collapse of Mr Arafat's regime.
But, initially at least, if the missiles on Mr Arafat's doorstep symbolized anything, it was Mr Sharon's frustration with Mr Arafat personally. Twenty-six civilians were killed within barely 12 hours on Saturday night and Sunday, in areas deep inside sovereign Israel.
Almost a hundred of those injured in the Jerusalem and Haifa suicide bombings were still in hospital last night, several of them fighting for their lives. Blamed by Israel for failing even to try to prevent the attacks, Mr Arafat has carried out dozens of arrests in the past few hours - and had them filmed by Palestinian TV crews to show the world that he is taking action.
To the public indignation of Mr Arafat's ministerial colleagues and spokespeople, who have been imploring Israel to halt its military actions and let them tackle the extremists, Mr Sharon insists that this is all trickery, a PR gimmick designed to mislead the watching world.
The prime minister's gut instinct may well have been to target Mr Arafat literally last night, not symbolically. But President Bush, at their talks on Sunday, evidently urged him not to do so. And even Mr Sharon knows that the ascent to Palestinian power of the most obvious alternative to Mr Arafat - Hamas - would usher in a yet more violent period.
In the short term, it is impossible to see how anything remotely productive can emerge from the horrific escalation of hostilities here.
Turning up the military heat on Mr Arafat is hardly likely to produce an intensified campaign by the Palestinian Authority against the militants. And, therefore, it is unlikely to prevent the recurrence of the weekend's devastating suicide bombings.
Ironically, having avoided this confrontation for months, the Bush Administration has a peace envoy on the ground - the entirely irrelevant Anthony Zinni, a retired Marine Corps general. His standing is too low, and his mission has clearly come too late.
The moment of truth for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came almost a year-and-a-half ago, at the Camp David summit in Maryland, when the former prime minister, Mr Ehud Barak, presented Israel's peace terms to an underwhelmed Mr Arafat.
The failure of that summit, and the utter mutual disillusion produced by its collapse and the ensuing intifada, have gradually brought the region to this new nadir - with an Israeli government refusing to "negotiate under fire" and "symbolically" targeting the man who was supposed to partner it to permanent peace.
Israeli forces thrust into Palestine-run Gaze airport early this morning. At least three armoured vehicles entered the airport, which has been out of operation since last year when the Palestinian uprising began.