GAZA — Rival militias guarding street corners, sporadic firefights and murky assassination attempts already make plain Gaza’s burgeoning internal strife.The question is not so much whether Hamas Islamists and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction are heading for all out civil war as whether it is still possible for anyone to pull them back.

“We are on the brink of a giant catastrophe,” said Fatah official Tawfiq Tirawi after a bomb attack on a senior Abbas loyalist and intelligence chief at the weekend.

“If this is not a civil war then what is it?” he said.

A power struggle has been growing since Hamas crushed Fatah in January elections to end its decades of dominance.

While Hamas took over the government peacefully in March, it has struggled to impose authority on security forces packed with Fatah men whose loyalty is to former commanders with every interest in seeing Hamas fail.

Tension is being exacerbated by Hamas’s inability to pay security forces or other government workers — the result of a funding boycott by Israel and Western countries hoping to push Hamas to recognise the Jewish state and renounce violence.

The risk of major confrontation soared when Hamas deployed a new 3,000-strong force in Gaza last week, prompting Abbas to order police out too. They clashed within barely a day.

Apparent assassination attempts on two top Abbas commanders at the weekend — one was badly wounded — have stoked worries further, though Hamas denied any responsibility. Unidentified gunmen killed a Fatah militant overnight.

“We are getting closer every day to a civil war,” said political analyst Hani Habib. “Hamas’s policy has made Fatah feel it faces a real crisis, a matter of life or death that forces it to fight back.”

Starting this week, Fatah and Hamas are due to join a ‘national dialogue’ aimed at defusing tension, but few hold much hope for success and some Palestinians fear that acrimonious exchanges there could actually worsen tension.

The struggle is as closely tied to personal interests as to political differences between Fatah, which wants statehood talks with Israel, and Hamas, formally committed to destroying Israel though it has followed a truce for the past year.

“The solution is for all parties to reduce armed displays on the streets,” said Hamdi Shaqoura of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza City. So far, there is no sign that either the bearded Hamas volunteers or the police and Fatah supporters will back down. Fatah militias have threatened their own deployment if the Hamas men remain on the streets. While the death toll is still in single figures, every time someone gets killed it means another funeral that becomes a platform for more vows of revenge in a cycle similar to that from the years of fighting with Israel.

Any conflict would be concentrated in the Gaza Strip, where Hamas has its power base. The presence of Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank also limits the room for manoeuvre by armed Palestinian groups.

Although Fatah loyalists have an overwhelming advantage in terms of numbers, Hamas fighters are often better armed and trained. Hamas has its own sources of funds, which might help it not only support its force but possibly bring on board fighters from other militant factions with shifting loyalties. Abbas, meanwhile, has growing support from the United States and other Western countries for building his elite Presidential Guard into a force that could prove a counterweight to Hamas. Foreign backing might also mean funding.

Other militants complicate the mix and there are growing signs of radical Islamists gaining a foothold. A group claiming links to al Qaeda said it had tried to kill an Abbas loyalist with a bomb in his lift, though there was no confirmation.

Even if Abbas’s forces were able to suppress Hamas fighters militarily, Hamas still controls the parliament on the basis of its election victory.

The only real winners might be those in Israel who would like to show that there is no Palestinian partner for peacemaking and that the Jewish state should therefore enact a separation plan to set a border unilaterally. The plan, already drawn up by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, would mean giving up some Jewish settlements in the West Bank, but strengthening others on land that Palestinians say is essential if they are ever to get a viable state.

“While Palestinians are busy fighting one another, Olmert proceeds with his plan uninterrupted,” said Habib.