On Peace Street, it's hard to tell where the scars of one war end and another's begin.

Yet the weekend battle that raged along this dusty alley in the Gaza Strip may just offer a glimmer of opportunity to ease conflict - though only if one looks beyond evidence that it adds new layers of hatred to an already tangled struggle.

The rubble of homes and the bullet-scarred mosque at the end of the road in the Palestinian border town of Rafah lay as fresh relics on Sunday of bloody clashes between Gaza's ruling Hamas Islamists and a splinter group aligned with global al Qaeda.

Identical heaps of concrete nearby mark the targets of Israeli air strikes during January's offensive, aimed in part at the tunnels leading from Egypt that help Hamas defy Israel's blockade.

There are traces, too, of fighting in 2007, when Hamas routed Fatah, the secular party of Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

For anyone wishing for an end to bloodshed, there were many negatives in the battle on Friday and Saturday along Shaareh al-Salam (Peace Street), where up to 28 people died.

While it is not the beginning, and probably not the end, of a challenge to Hamas from a smattering of small groups that find Osama bin Laden's global Jihadist agenda more to their taste than Hamas's Palestinian nationalist priorities, analysts generally agree that the battle brought the issue into focus.

"This is a major development in the relationship between Hamas and these Jihadist groups," said Are Hovdenak, who wrote a paper on the subject this year for Oslo's International Peace Research Institute. "Hamas has shown it is ready to crack down."

The battle indicated some strength of arms on the part of Jund Ansar Allah (Warriors of God), which came to attention in June with a horseback raid on an Israeli border post.

And it was not hard to find some sympathy in Gaza, which is home to 1.5 million people, for Jund Ansar and its leader, a paediatrician and preacher named Abdel-Latif Moussa.

"Those were men of God and Hamas is an Islamist movement," lamented a man named Bassem as he described a "night of horror" in Rafah. "Muslims are killing Muslims, over what?"

Relatives and neighbours described the grey-bearded doctor, who used the nom de guerre Abu al-Nour al-Maqdessi, as having been a peaceable devotee of fundamentalist Islam, often known as Salafist. He stepped forward to lead younger, violent Jihadist followers in frustration with Hamas persecution, friends said.