Voting for student government at Gaza City's Al-Azhar University was proceeding smoothly on a recent fall morning until a pushing match erupted outside a polling booth. Kalashnikovs appeared seemingly from nowhere as gunmen stormed onto campus.
At the front gate security guards ducked for cover instead of checking IDs. Panicked students scrambled for shelter beneath bursts of automatic gunfire.
The Gaza Strip is an overcrowded tinderbox of discontent and desperation, which is bubbling up in the territory's universities. "The university is not like it used to be," says Iman Abu Amra, 22, the favoured candidate for student body president in last week's election.
"Nowadays, politics is more important than classes and education," she adds. Palestinian universities are traditional bellwethers of public opinion and political winds.
In Gaza, plagued by lawlessness and infighting between the ousted Fatah party of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and the ruling Hamas movement, the universities reflect the violent schisms.
This is apparent nowhere more clearly than at Gaza City's Al-Azhar University and its neighbour, the Islamic University. Founded by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Al-Azhar is a Fatah stronghold. Next door, the Islamic University is Hamas country.
"At the Islamic University they put so much religious pressure on their students and the self-repression is great," charges Nora al-Masri, a Fatah student activist milling about the courtyard of Al-Azhar. Next door, they have a different take.
"Our blood is green," says Islamic University student council president Sherif Abu Shamala, referring to the color of the ruling Islamist movement Hamas. "If you want a good education, you study here." Dozens of windows at the Islamic University remain shattered from a recent battle sparked by an inflammatory speech by exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus.
Stones and fists soon turned to guns, and before the dust had settled, a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into an Al-Azhar classroom. "This isn't just a game," says Shamala. "University students represent an educated and influential segment of Palestinian society. Revolutions the world over began with the students."
Indeed, the now-ruling Hamas got its start as a campus charity organisation at the Islamic University in the late 1970s. The school's long-time president, Mohammed Shubair, has been tapped by Hamas to succeed Ismail Haniya as Palestinian prime minister in a prospective unity government.
The most recent flare-up between the neighbouring universities began earlier this month when the sliver of Fatah students at the Islamic University wanted to mark the second anniversary of Arafat's death with a campus rally. But the school's Hamas-controlled student body rejected their application.
When Fatah supporters marched outside the campus' gates, despite the ban, the Islamic University's classrooms and lecture halls emptied of pro-Hamas students who clashed with the Fatah activists.
Then, last week, Hamas students decided to boycott the Al-Azhar campus vote, citing procedural mistakes. Fatah students said the real reason Hamas pulled out was because they knew they would lose and sought to undermine the vote's credibility.
After the first day of voting - for the 11 male student council members - Fatah supporters surged through the city's streets firing their Kalashnikovs indiscriminately skyward, hailing their victory.
Last Wednesday, on day two of the vote - for the 11 female council members - Hamas was nowhere to be found. Then, a scuffle broke out and minutes later bullets were flying.
A Fatah student leader who won a seat in the previous day's vote, Mohammed Abu Nahal, was left unconscious and bleeding. Someone had slammed a steel pipe into his skull. Some said the battle was the result of a family feud, unrelated to campus politics. Hamas supporters said the battle was between competing student Fatah factions.
At the hospital where Abu Nahl was being treated, Al-Azhar student Fuad Shaht blamed Hamas supporters from the Islamic University.
"I think it's clear who is responsible," said Shaht, stone-faced. "We don't have friendly neighbours."