Ifaf Msebeh, her mother, said that Hibba, who had been due to marry next summer, clapped her hands in glee when her grandmother denounced the gunmen on both sides for thinking only of their petty interests while Gaza starved.

“My daughter said, ‘Now grandmother is a spokeswoman for the Palestinian people’,” Msebeh, 46, recalled last week, sitting in mourning, wrapped against the winter cold in a black hijab and houndstooth black-and-white wool coat. “She was so happy.”

Hibba, the only girl among seven brothers, had wanted to study politics at university but was dissuaded. “Study something useful,” insisted Mohamed Msebeh, her 51-year-old father. She enrolled to read economics but never lost her interest in politics. Now her father, a dentist, sits inconsolable in a black jacket and trousers, his arms wrapped tightly around his upper chest.

Late-night discussions like that at the kitchen table in the Msebeh home reverberated throughout Gaza last week, as shops and schools shut and people stayed indoors for safety from the street battles that erupted without warning.

The battle between gunmen from Fatah, the secular party of Mahmoud Abbas, the president, and Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist party of Ismail Haniya, the prime minister, even spilt into the courtyard of Shifa hospital, where gunmen fired from rooftops while doctors and nurses cowered inside, unable to reach the wounded.

Despite the danger, Hibba went to her classes at Azar University as usual last Sunday. When fighting broke out she headed for home. Her favourite brother Sala’am, 17, met her and they hurried along, arm in arm.

Hibba was on her mobile phone to her mother, saying she would be back in a few minutes, when a bullet smashed into her right cheek and out through the back of her head.

“I began screaming for an ambulance but none could come because of all the shooting,” Sala’am recalled last week, stroking a cut on his nose sustained when he fainted in hospital at the news that Hibba was dead.

Her fiancé, Louai Limgani, 28, heard about her death on the television news in Cairo, where he is studying to be a doctor. “He is so angry,” Hibba’s mother said.

Later the family sat in their courtyard, passing around a large card that Hibba kept by her bed. It was made by her fiancé and she would gaze at photographs of the couple inside, with the word “Love” pierced by a Cupid’s arrow. “She was my only daughter,” her father said. “The loss of Hibba is equal to the loss of all my seven boys.”

The family’s one remaining hope is that her death may not be in vain. Her senseless shooting has galvanised a population already bitter at the murderous infighting.

Public outrage began to mount when Hamas militants shot dead the three young sons of a Fatah security official as they were driven to school on December 11. They were aged between four and nine.

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