The wreckage of the war in Gaza is bad enough. According to Palestinian estimates, one in seven of the crowded territory’s buildings has been completely or partially destroyed, leaving tens of thousands homeless amid losses valued at nearly $2 billion. In three weeks of bombing, some 1,300 of Gaza’s 1.5m people may have been killed and many thousands wounded—almost as many as the number of Britons, proportionally, who were killed by the German blitz in the second world war. Yet the political repercussions of this war may reach further than the physical damage.

The peacemakers barely know where to start. The old divisions, not just between Israelis and Arabs but also between rival Palestinian factions and their bickering foreign backers, have got deeper. Political rows are already muddling the urgent task of getting aid to Gaza, let alone efforts to secure the fragile ceasefire, rebuild the territory and forge a broader Arab-Israeli peace.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, speaking at a recent, fractious Arab summit meeting in Kuwait, gave warning to Palestinians that their own rifts were “more dangerous than Israeli aggression”. Palestinians who have long despaired at the quarrel between Fatah, the secular, peace-talking party that runs the West Bank, and Hamas, the Islamist champion of “resistance” which won legislative elections in 2006 and seized power in Gaza a year later, would heartily agree. Yet although the war has prompted a chorus of demands for the parties to come to terms before the Gaza-West Bank split dooms any chance of a unified Palestinian state, it has also accentuated their differences.

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