The Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, entered the Amman hospital room, walked slowly to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin's bed, leaned over, and gently kissed the prone bearded figure twice on each cheek and three times on the forehead. The extravagant warmth with which Mr Arafat greeted Sheikh Yassin yesterday only underlined the surreal nature of the scene: here was the president of the Palestinian Authority, who has spent weeks arresting Hamas activists and closing Hamas TV stations, schools and welfare institutions, purporting to be delightedly renewing his acquaintance with the man who founded Hamas in the 1980s as a militant Islamic movement virulently opposed not only to Israel's existence but to Mr Arafat's secular Palestinian leadership.
But if it was galling for Mr Arafat to have to appease Hamas sympathisers in the West Bank and Gaza by putting on a smiling face yesterday, how infuriating must it have been for the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, to have ordered the paraplegic cleric's release from an Israeli prison hospital in the early hours of Wednesday.
Sheikh Yassin, after all, is said by Israel to have set up the Hamas military wing, the Izzedin alQassam brigade, responsible for more than a dozen suicide bombings in Israel in the past three years.
Mr Netanyahu's government is devoting much of its effort to trying to smash the Hamas militants, particularly in the wake of two suicide bombings in Jerusalem this summer. That Mr Netanyahu has now freed the movement's founder underlines the gravity of the crisis from which the sheikh's release is designed to extricate Israel.
Israeli state TV and radio are now reporting as indisputable fact that the sheikh was released in the wake of a ludicrous Mossad attempt to kill another Hamas leader, Mr Khaled Mashaal, on the streets of Amman last week.
King Hussein was so incensed to discover that Mossad was operating in his capital, he reportedly threatened to break off ties with Israel. His brother, Crown Prince Hassan, reportedly took a video of the captured Mossad men's confession to President Clinton a few days ago.
Mr Netanyahu apparently made amends first by providing the antidote to the lethal nerve agent with which Mr Mashaal's assailants attacked him (Mr Mashaal has now been released from hospital), and then by delivering Sheikh Yassin to Jordan - ensuring that the king, instead of facing Hamas revenge attacks for having hosted the Mossad hitmen, is now winning Hamas plaudits.
So weak was Mr Netanyahu's position that he apparently had to consent to Sheikh Yassin returning soon to Gaza, perhaps within two weeks. And it remains unclear whether, in the wake of the sheikh's release, King Hussein will now quietly deport the two Mossad hitmen to Israel, or put them on trial in Amman.
"There is no deal," the king said yesterday, when asked about such a swap.
The Mossad men, named by Jordanian sources yesterday as Barry Beads and Shaun Kendall, were carrying Canadian passports.
Canada's Prime Minister, Mr Jean Chretien, said yesterday that it was "completely unacceptable" for another government to have used "the Canadian passport to perpetrate any illegal action".
It is assumed that Mr Netanyahu would personally have had to approve the failed hit, and its timing, venue and target are all arousing intense criticism in Israeli intelligence circles: the attempted killing of a marginal Hamas figure, in the capital of a key Arab ally, at a time of highly-strained relations.
David Horovitz is managing editor of the Jerusalem Report