Michael Hirst looks at how al-Qaida, Syria and Iran are involved in the destabilisation of Israel, while, below, Trevor Mostyn examines why Palestinian has turned on Palestinian in Gaza

It is not a good time to be Palestinian. While civil war in the Gaza Strip has killed 120, leaving the Palestinian Territories under the control of two rival governments, in Lebanon the country's army has been pounding strongholds of the militant Fatah al-Islam group in the crammed streets of Nahr al Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp outside the northern port city of Tripoli.

On the face of it, the parallel crises have little in common. In Palestine, the conflict is between the political Hamas and Fatah factions. In Lebanon, it is between the Lebanese army and shady Islamic extremists linked both to al-Qaida and Syrian intelligence. Delve beneath the surface, however, and the tentacles of an Iranian regime bent on destabilising the Middle East and fomenting a regional war by proxy can be discerned.

On the one hand, Hamas, which signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran last June, makes no secret of the fact that it now receives most of its financial (some £400 million, analysts suggest) and military support from Tehran. Colonel Bahaa Balusha, the Fatah-loyal head of Palestinian intelligence in Gaza who fled to Ramallah as war raged across the strip, believes the takeover by Hamas last week was carried out under orders from Iran. He said that Fatah's forces had been outgunned with Iranian-supplied state-of-the-art artillery supplied by Hamas fighters, who were working on "an Iranian agenda" that involved a wider conflict in the region.

On the other, Iran is also believed to fund, arm and train the militant Shia group, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, with weapons and fighters crossing into Lebanon from neighbouring Syria, a staunch Iranian ally. While the attention and firepower of the Lebanese army have been focused on neutralising terror threats emerging from within Palestinian refugee camps, Hezbollah has been regrouping and rebuilding its military strongholds for a future conflict with Israel.

Lebanon is home to 400,000 mostly Sunni Palestinian refugees forced from their homes during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. These refugees are housed in 12 "camps", or impoverished townships, across Lebanon, which are governed by Palestinian militia. Camp residents are not allowed to own property in Lebanon, to vote, or to work in most sectors, and there seems little possibility of the long-dreamed of return to family homes in Israel-Palestine. Put simply, prospects for young Palestinians in these camps are grim.

Throw into this equation the fact that the camps are essentially off-limits for Lebanese authorities under a 40-year "gentleman's agreement" with neighbouring Arab regimes that had accepted Palestinian refugees, and it is not surprising that Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise. The camps are seen as a safe haven for veterans of the Iraq insurgency, and in the past few months shadowy al-Qaida-linked groups have crossed the porous borders between Iraq and Syria, and then the equally porous frontier between Syria and Lebanon, and set themselves up in the camps.

Lebanon is embroiled in a eight-month internal power struggle between its Sunni-led government and a Shia opposition movement spearheaded by Hezbollah, the perceived victors of last summer's bitter 34-day war against Israel. Radical Sunni groups are reported to be funded by individual contributions from oil-rich Saudis, seeking to offset the influence of Hezbollah and its Iranian backers. Jawad Adra, the managing partner of Information International, an independent Beirut-based research body, believes this increasing polarisation is providing a fertile breeding ground for anti-Western extremism among Lebanon's Sunni communities.

"Western countries need to be careful that their political support for Lebanon's Sunni leaders, to offset the supposed Shia threat posed by Iran through Hezbollah, does not play into the hands of Sunni extremists," he told me earlier this year. "The growth of Sunni extremism, not just in the Palestinian camps but also in impoverished areas of Lebanon, is a ticking time-bomb that is waiting to explode, and could sweep all moderates out of its path."

That warning became reality with the country thrown into renewed turmoil on 20 May when Lebanese military positions in the northern port city of Tripoli came under attack by Fatah al-Islam fighters. The Lebanese army has responded by shelling militant positions deep in the Nahr al-Bared camp, killing 50 civilian residents caught in the crossfire.

Stridently disowned by the Palestinian Fatah party of which it purports to be an offshoot, Fatah al-Islam is led by the Palestinian-born fugitive, Shakir al-Abssi, and raised concerns among Lebanese security officials late last year after reports that 300 of its members had infiltrated the northern Palestinian refugee camps of Badawi and Nahr al-Bared. Fighting has also broken out in the southern refugee camp of Ain el-Hilweh, this time when another group of Sunni extremists, Jund al-Sham, launched strikes on Lebanese army posts outside the southern port city of Saida. Palestinian militants this week also launched rocket attacks on Israel from southern Lebanon.

While shocking, this outbreak of violence has not been unexpected. The British Foreign Office Minister, Kim Howells, had warned during a visit to Beirut earlier this year that "seasoned jihadists" from Iraq were flocking to Lebanon because they regard it as a soft target for terrorist attacks. Mr Howells told me of the danger posed by the emergence of new Sunni jihadists in Palestinian camps after a briefing by the commander of the 12,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping force serving in southern Lebanon.

Whether or not Syria and Iran are behind the recent violence in Palestine and Lebanon, the weakening of pro-Western political factions in each country is clearly beneficial to Iranian hopes for more influence in the region. As Paul Salem of the Beirut-based Carnegie Institute for Peace in the Middle East points out, there is a broadening danger of a breakdown of the traditional states that have defined the regional's politics for the past 40 years. Like Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon now have rival claimants to power backed by their own militaries. The "Palestinian issue" seems as insoluble as it ever has been and, for the Palestinians themselves, the bad times seem set to continue.

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