I've hardly left the house in three days. Last night, I took shelter in the bathroom as bullets flew past my fourth floor window.

The situation on the ground in Gaza was already dire, even before May 13 and the latest intense escalation in violence. "Gaza is hell on earth," Fareed told me unsentimentally as we sat in his comfortable East Jerusalem apartment only last week. It was so easy, then, to take a taxi back to my hotel and walk around the corner for a coffee and a late dinner.

But in Gaza, night and day, the city is a ghost town. Hardly anyone dares step outside. There are rumours Fateh gunmen are simply shooting at anything that moves, and some families have been trapped in their homes for four days. Electricity supplies are low, and fuel shipments were cut off following Tuesday's violence at the Karni checkpoint, Gaza's only supply line.

Following a strike by the municipality over unpaid wages, rubbish is piled high in the streets. It's set alight every night, filling the air with an acrid smoke. Now, even if the city's cleaners wanted to return to work, the streets are too dangerous.

Dr. Musa El-Haddad - a retired doctor living in Gaza City - went on to the streets yesterday to buy enough bread for three days. His family have already run out of coffee. All but a few shops selling essentials are closed in the strip's capital city after masked gunmen - on a rampage through the streets and shooting into the air - harassed most shopkeepers into locking their doors.

Ahmed, who runs a small supermarket around the corner from my hotel, recounts his experience: "A group of gunmen came by yesterday. They were going shop to shop and intimidating us, trying to force us to close." He stayed open today, for his sake and the sake of his customers, but his plans for the future aren't so clear.

"Both sides are at fault. No one knows where this is heading. I don't see a way out..."

Musa chuckles as he helps his wife Maii in the kitchen, explaining that they dared only head outside for a few minutes. The streets are patrolled by masked gunmen, and snipers have taken up positions on the roofs of the city's high-rise buildings.

The city's doctors and nurses have shown an incredible willingness to keep hospitals operating as usual, with staff often sleeping overnight in the building. Maii, Musa's wife, was even considering going to work in her downtown clinic located directly in front of Gaza's Islamic University, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting the Gaza Strip has ever seen.

That night, things get even worse. The city is under siege. Laila El-Haddad, an incredibly brave and dedicated Gaza journalist, and I are reporting from her living room. Outside, Fateh and Hamas factions exchange heavy arms fire, RPGs and mortars rounds in a battle to control strategic areas of the city.

As shots are fired frighteningly close to her kitchen window, her son, Yousuf, bounds around the house oblivious. He's only three years old. I try to imagine how all this violence and chaos is affecting him, the trauma he must be experiencing. I hope he's still too young to understand. Maybe he'll come out unscathed.

Laila tells him the sound outside is someone making popcorn in the streets. During a lull in the fighting, Yousuf jumps to his feet. "They've finished making popcorn. Can we go out side and see?"

We hear reports that residents of several high-rise residential towers in Western Gaza City are trapped inside, their buildings taken over by unidentified gunmen. They've set fire to some of the buildings, burning residents' cars and firing at ambulances. Gunmen are searching every flat for suspects. It's impossible to evacuate any of the wounded.

We manage to contact a woman named Um Muntaser in Borj El-Saleh, a residential tower in the west of the city. She tells us over the phone that some children in the building are wounded, and her son passed out from smoke inhalation. Nobody can move, and gunmen are paying no attention to the innocents around them.

"We have been living in our kitchen for the past two days," says the 42-year-old mother of seven. "Eleven or 12 apartments have been burned... There are snipers everywhere... We are human beings. What's our fault in all this?"

Um Muntaser, and all the other innocents of Gaza, are the ones paying the heaviest price for this vulgar and obsessive power struggle.

Several hours into the fighting, Mustafa Barghouti - the Palestinian Authority's Information Minister - responds positively to Hamas' ceasefire offer, scheduled to begin in two hours. That night, still reading news of the ceasefire, gun battles continue to rage on the streets. I hear children screaming as the fumes of burning rubbish fill my lungs.

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