Amid the carnage, Egyptian society has slowly begun to unravel. Islamist pitted against nationalist, neighbor against neighbor, father against son. Even some traffic accidents are now cast in harshly politicized tones.

When a bearded pedestrian was knocked-down by a taxi while crossing the road a few days ago, he barked "Sisi killer" at the clean-shaven driver (in reference to army chief General al-Sisi).

Popular committees have re-emerged in many neighborhoods for the first time since the revolution. Brandishing sticks and sometimes machetes, they search cars and devote particular attention to interrogating men with long beards.

"I'm scared. There's just so much anger and so much hate," said my downstairs neighbor, an 80-year-old former Deputy Minister of Agriculture who has put off a much-needed doctor's appointment for fear of leaving his apartment.

The security forces dispersal of the two pro-Morsi camps on Wednesday was ferocious and pitiless by any measure. At least 700 died and thousands were wounded across the country, as the police, backed by the military, moved to empty the sit-in protests that had occupied two squares on the fringes of Central Cairo since former president Morsi's overthrow in early July.

Justifying the crackdown, interim government officials insisted these camps were dens of armed insurrection and obstacles to the city's traffic flow.

Certainly, many of these people weren't blameless. An investigation conducted by Amnesty International uncovered evidence of torture by Morsi supporters in the vicinity of the Rabaa al-Adaweya camp on the Western outskirts, and they, too, had guns.

In the upscale Mohandeseen neighborhood, where men evicted from the Nahda camp sought to establish another sit-in protest, a van laden with AK47s pulled up near to the front line where Morsi supporters were battling police and distributed weaponry. The fighting swiftly intensified, with both sides suffering casualties amid the thick black pall of burning tires and blazing police trucks.

The police have been hit hard by the Islamist backlash to the camps' dispersal, with 45 policemen among the dead on Wednesday, including 11 executed and then incinerated in their police station just outside Cairo. Police have now been withdrawn from outside many embassies and confined to barracks for fear that isolated units might be vulnerable to revenge attacks.

But despite some Morsi supporters' willingness to engage in armed combat, the interim government's insistence that security forces used the bare minimum of violence scarcely rings true. Even before Islamists in Mohandeseen began returning fire, the police pelted their hastily erected barricades with live bullets and appeared to target foreign journalists videoing proceedings from an apartment window.

"The police and army are the murderers, not us. They are trying to kill us all. They are the terrorists," said Hafez, a Muslim Brotherhood supporter who was riddled with birdshot by police during the fierce and bloody daylong exchange in Mohandeseen.