Donald Macintyre: Blood flows as the dust settles in Gaza's civil war. And on the West Bank they mourn

Samir Hamad lit a Marlboro Red, took a sip from his glass of sweet mint tea, picked up a copy of yesterday's Al Quds newspaper and started reading out, with considerable disgust, the latest proclamation from Kamal Sheikh, the Palestinian police chief, to his Fatah-supporting officers in Gaza. The police chief's instructions are not to co-operate with Hamas, not to go to work, and not to take any instructions from any Minister of the Interior appointed by Hamas. "Of course this is a bad thing," says Mr Hamad. "He has a nice villa here in Ramallah, and he is telling people in Gaza what to do."

Mr Hamad and the friends who have gathered in his pharmacy do not include one Hamas supporter. News junkies to a man, they have been watching with mounting horror all week the savage conflict in Gaza, including the casualties among Palestinians who are - like them - politically unaffiliated civilians. They have read the reports of Fatah and Hamas activists being thrown off buildings, of ambulances being hijacked for use as military vehicles and of the exchanges of fire in and around hospitals. "When I was young people used to talk about the Palestinian people as the smartest people in the world," says Mr Hamad. "Now we have proved we are the stupidest."

After a week of carnage in Gaza cost the lives of over 80 people, this was a pardonable hyperbole. But Mr Hamad, 45, was talking about more than the brief and bloody civil war which left Hamas victorious in Gaza this week - and for which he blames both Fatah and Hamas. He was also talking about what he saw as public tolerance for an inadequate political leadership which helped to pave the way to the fighting.

Given the political investment the US is making in the new Hamas-free emergency government being assembled here by the (Fatah) Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Condoleeza Rice will surely be visiting Ramallah soon. When she does, she could do worse than spend an hour or so outside the government and administrative quarter - where Fatah gunmen yesterday went on a rampage in revenge for their rout in Gaza last week, trying to kidnap the Hamas deputy speaker of the parliament and ransacking offices - and drop in on Mr Hamad's pharmacy in the Al Amari refugee camp less than a mile from the presidential compound at the Muqata.

If the discussion is anything like as lively and well informed as it was yesterday, she will learn a lot. It's true that Mr Hamad and his friend Ismail Marbua, 50, a furniture retailer, disagreed on the viability of the emerging Western-Israeli policy of freeing frozen funds to Mr Abbas's new government to administer in the West Bank - while continuing its deep freeze on Gaza, where Hamas now maintains internal control The US now shows every sign of lifting - for the Abbas-run West Bank only - the international boycott imposed on the Palestinian Authority after the newly elected Hamas ministers took office last March. And Israel is expected to come under pressure not only to release the accumulated revenues of $400m it owes the Palestinians since freezing the payments last March but also to start dismantling some of the checkpoints and roadblocks which a World Bank report last month blamed for the devastating collapse of the West Bank economy. All of this, of course, is partly to show the Gazans the adverse consequences of living under a Hamas administration.

Neither of the two friends in the pharmacy likes this policy - or indeed Mr Abbas's dramatic decision last Thursday to form a new emergency government whose writ will in practice run only in the West Bank. "This was the worst decision taken by the [Palestinian Authority] since 1993," said Mr Marbua. "It was a decision not by a leader of the Palestinian people, but by a leader of Fatah."

But while Mr Marbua says he is sceptical about whether Israel will genuinely ease conditions in the West Bank, Mr Hamad tells him: "When a policeman who hasn't been paid for six months starts to get his money, he will condemn Hamas and all the prophets. The economy will improve and you will be able to sell furniture again."

But Mr Hamad adds: "The trouble is no one wants Gaza, Israel doesn't want it, Egypt doesn't want it, and now [with Mr Abbas's decision to appoint a new government] we're saying we don't want it either."

Whatever some of the more irredentist Fatah people round him may privately feel about Gaza, Mr Abbas would certainly deny the last charge. As a veteran of every negotiating process with Israel since the Oslo accords in 1993, he has never wavered in his belief that the conflict can only be settled in the long term by a Palestinian state consisting of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Whatever the chatter in some Israeli circles about a "three-state solution" - Israel, Gaza and the West Bank - he is unlikely to be wavering now. But in any case any final negotiated solution to the conflict remains for now a distant and theoretical prospect; the present issues are much more pressing - how to prevent last week's violence spreading from Gaza to the west Bank, where Fatah is still in the ascendant, and how to ease the increasingly dire economic plight of Palestinians - the 1.5 million in Gaza as well as the 2.5 million in the West Bank.

Hamas, formed in Gaza as an offshoot of the Muslim brotherhood in 1987, with the goal of an Islamic state across the whole of historic Palestine - including what became Israel in 1948 - has almost always been at odds with its rival. Hamas has resolutely refused to recognise Israel, though its political leadership have offered a long-term "hudna" or truce with Israel in return for a Palestinian state based on the borders before the seizure of the West Bank and Gaza in the Six Day War. Fatah was formed by Yasser Arafat in the 1950s with the same original goal but eventually agreed to recognise Israel and pursue a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.

But while there are many factors in the background of last week's explosive violence in Gaza, ideology was hardly top of the list. One was the inherent instability of a Fatah presidency co-habiting with a Hamas Prime Minister and cabinet. Mr Abbas thought he could live with this but other elements in Fatah refused to accept Hamas's election victory in 2006, just as elements in Hamas refused to accept the "national unity" coalition government formed under a deal brokered by Saudi Arabia in March of this year.

What may have accounted for the conflict's peculiar savagery, however, was another element: revenge. The decisive engagement in Hamas's military campaign, the battle on Thursday for the headquarters of Preventative Security in Gaza City, was certainly one of the bloodiest. Witnesses said that after it several of the Fatah activists were dragged from the building and executed in the street. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri denied there had been executions and insisted: "Whoever was killed was killed in clashes." But a Fatah official said seven of the faction's activists had been shot outside the building and a doctor said that he had examined two bodies of men shot at close range in the head.

But the Preventative Security headquarters was more than just another bastion of Fatah's to be conquered. For it was by this security force and from this building that Yasser Arafat's famous crackdown on his Hamas opponents was carried out in the mid-1990s. It was there that the interrogations took place in which Hamas figures of the time are alleged to have been tortured by Fatah forces. Thursday's bloody assault carried the menacing edge of settling scores more than a decade old.

Yet Fatah's rout in Gaza also underlined what has become two competing realities in the two component parts of what last night seemed the ever-more distant prospect of a Palestinian state. Even in relatively peaceful times, Gaza has been almost totally separated from the West Bank. The comprehensive agreement which Condoleeza Rice thought she had brokered in November 2005, and which included provisions for "safe passage" from Gaza to the West Bank, has made not a jot of difference. If it was problematic for Gazans to visit Egypt, given the frequent closures of the Rafah crossing, it was still easier to get to Cairo than to Hebron, the nearest West Bank city to the Strip.

With the borders at present completely sealed, it looks as if the Strip is going to become even more of a "big prison" - the term much used by Gazans - than ever. While Israel insists that it plans to allow essential humanitarian aid through, it has also been quick to see the opportunities for treating Gaza and the West Bank quite differently. Whatever other worries Israel has - including the military threat from what some describe as a "Hamastan" in Gaza - it has taken satisfaction from the abject failure of a unity government which neither it and the US ever wanted.

The reasons for that failure are complex. Nobody can be blamed for the savage internecine violence of the past few days other than the factions themselves. But the international community is certainly open to the charge of not doing more to shore up those elements in Hamas that were seeking to make the national unity government work. It was far harder for them when there appeared to be no hope of removing the international boycott. The hurdles set for engaging with the Hamas government - including recognition of Israel and total renunciation of any future armed actions - were all but impassable. Nor did the West succeed in pressing Israel to do more to help Mahmoud Abbas when it really counted, in the year after he was elected President in January 2005. If it had Hamas might never have been elected in the first place.

All of that said Hamas, for better or worse, is now in charge of internal security in Gaza. That may have one unalloyed benefit. After its formidable show of strength in the Strip last week, it is beginning to look possible that it will be able to persuade the kidnappers of the BBC journalist Alan Johnston to release their hostage, and end his terrible three-month ordeal. For that at least everyone would be deeply thankful.

PALESTINE DIVIDED

The Fatah President

Mahmoud Abbas: Co-founder of Fatah with Yasser Arafat, and succeeded him as President in 2004. Dissolved government and sacked Haniyeh last week.

The Hamas Premier

Ismail Haniyeh: Hamas leader since 2004, elected PM in January 2006. His force of 3,000 in Gaza routed Fatah. Refuses to accept his dismissal.

Further reading: 'Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege' by Amira Hass (Owl Books, £6.99)

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