“Maku Fitna, Maku Fitna,” self-assured Iraqis wrongly predicted to sceptical journalists four years ago. “No civil war, no civil war.”

“Ma fii fitna, maa fii fitna,” their Gaza Palestinian cousins have insisted ever since, with increasing desperation and decreasing credibility.

A different Arabic dialect, but the same misplaced confidence that internal rivalries within their societies would not explode into full-blown internecine strife.

Well the sandbags are now up in Gaza, even on Unity Street. And it is to protect Palestinian gunman against Palestinian gunman. There isn’t an Israeli in sight.

Blockade drains life from Gaza

The movement of goods into Gaza had been intermittent at best since Hamas won Palestinian elections early last year

Multimedia

• Pictures: Johnston is released

• Video: unarmed protester confronts gunman in Gaza

• Pictures: life in Gaza

Background

• Q&A: Hamas and Gaza

• 97 days and counting for BBC's man in Gaza

• Now war is with the enemy within

• The little girl trapped by a quirk of war

Related Links

• Hamas orders rivals to surrender

• How Islamists drew strength from failures

Whether the latest round of Gaza bloodletting amounts to a full-blown civil war is a point for historians to argue over.

What it is, unquestionably, is the latest symptom of a fragmented, dysfunctional society in which the waxing Islamist strain and waning secular brand of Palestinian nationalism are locked and loaded into the violent stage of a decades-old struggle for the soul of Palestine.

But kidnappings of combatants and journalists, enemies being thrown off roofs, gunmen surrounding the Presidential compound and RPGs being fired at the Prime Minister’s office highlight a level of internal instability that makes Gaza a different place from the one I first encountered in the opening days of the second intifada in October 2000.

Then Palestinian gravediggers were complaining that they had run out of cement. Then, as now, they are unlikely to run out of bodies.

But back then they were burying the victims of Israeli-Palestinian warfare. Now it is Palestinian on Palestinian.

The other key difference is that back then it was possible for a journalist to stand in the middle of a Gaza cemetery without a second thought, interviewing civilians, politicians, pundits, or gunmen from Hamas, Fatah, the PFLP and Islamic Jihad without fear of kidnap.

For years Gaza, although unstable, was a place where you could have lunch with Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, spend hours in the markets and streets talking to ordinary Gazans or even have an alcoholic drink over shrimps in a clay pot with secular Palestinian Authority officials at one of Gaza’s very pleasant beachfront restaurants.

No more, as the last – United Nations – bar finally went the way of Gaza’s cinemas, nightclubs and other entertainments deemed ’un-Islamist’ by any one of the Hamas, Islamic Jihad or the shadowy ’Army of Islam’ and other splinter groups that act either independently, or as fronts for the larger organizations.

Now it is much harder to work in the sealed-off coastal strip, with the threat of abduction by kidnappers – whether motivated by religion, politics, money or all three.

There is also the threat of stray bullets, shells and grenades.

When the battles were between Israeli and Palestinian fighters it was relatively easy to operate. Establish where the Israeli tanks have rumbled in from border fence or Jewish settlement, get close to the street, village or suburb under attack and try to establish the facts first hand during the fighting, or as soon as possible afterwards.

Man with green helmet and big gun: Israeli. Man with keffiyeh and small gun: Palestinian.

Now, during one recent battle between Hamas and Fatah, it was simply impossible to tell where the Kalashnikov rounds were coming from, black-uniformed Hamas police on one tower block spraying fire at blue-fatigued Fatah security forces. Except that the latest Hamas police forces also have blue uniforms. And the Fatah-dominated Presidential Guard wear black. As do Islamic Jihad.

It would be wrong to say Gaza was safe. It goes through cycles of danger.

In July 2005 I watched as Hamas loyalists torched a Palestinian Authority armoured car that dared to venture into their Zaytoun stronghold, after a long gun battle between bearded Islamists and angry clean-shaven Fatah-niks that made a mockery of the PA’s “One authority, one law” slogan.

Hamas gunmen called their internal rivals “scum”, jeering that if they had seen off the Israelis, they could see off Fatah, even as the arriving firemen shook their head with disgust at having to deal with Palestinian on Palestinian violence.

During the Prophet Muhammad cartoon controversy, armed gangs raided hotels looking for westerners. European offices were attracked, and burnt.

In previous crises journalists were kidnapped, long before the BBC Correspondent Alan Johnson. But none for so long, or amid such instability.

And one key factor about that instability is the environment in which it takes place – a 40km by 8km coastal strip in which 1.4 million Palestinians are entirely sealed off from the outside world by Israel’s military might. Israel has gone from Gaza itself, having dismantled its handful of Jewish settlements.

But Israel controls all land crossing points for goods and people – including the only international crossing point at Rafah which, although run by Egyptians and Palestinians, can be shut down at a moment’s notice by Israel.

Israel controls the sea – its gunboats stop any Palestinian going more than a few miles offshore. It controls the air - Gaza’s Palestinian airport has been shut for half a decade, bulldozed and bombed by Israel. Its tanks and Humvees patrol the Israeli border.

And since Israel pulled out its fighter jets and artillery batteries have regularly poured fire into Gaza, citing Palestinian rocket attacks on nearby Israeli towns.

Palestinians blame decades of Israeli occupation for many of their woes, saying rats trapped in a sack will inevitably turn on each other. Israel blames the Palestinians for failing to take advantage of its historic 2005 withdrawal to turn Gaza into a showcase for a future Palestinian state.

And people continue, and will continue, to die, with few sanguine that a war in Gaza will stay in Gaza.

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