The media have been using every circumlocution in the book to try to depict the endemic violence in Palestinian territories as not being a Civil War. Reasons speculated by others:

If it is a Civil War it means it is a Civil War not instigated by occupation by Israel or America (some critics of the Iraq War blame American occupation for the violence in Iraq)

If it is a Civil War then the Palestinians might actually be responsible for their own actions.

An alien from Mars would almost instantly diagnose the problem of the Palestinians from simply listening to their inane apologists: The problem is not the acquisition of the final seven percent of the West Bank denied in the offer to them at Camp David, but the pathology of a victim culture, one that has learned, through playing the card of terror with simultaneous appeals to multicultural guilt, how to shake down Westerners for their money, attention, and pity.

Evidence that the Palestinian problem is more about Israel and less about the well-being of Palestinians was underscored Wednesday. When roughly 1,000 civilian Palestinians marched through Gaza City chanting "stop the killing," two of the demonstrators were killed and four were wounded after one or both of the factions opened fire on them.