In the early afternoon on Wednesday, as deadly clashes in Egypt drew into their seventh hour, I found myself sitting with three of my colleagues in an apartment overlooking the southern entrance to Rabaa al-Adawiya, in Cairo’s middle-class Nasr City neighborhood. In recent weeks, it had been the site of a sit-in protesting the removal of President Mohamed Morsi, a Brotherhood politician, from the Presidency in early July. On Wednesday, the area looked like a war zone. To our left, we could see two dozen armor-clad policemen, dressed entirely in black, standing in formation near what had once been a fortification of sandbags built by protesters to keep the police out. To our right, black smoke and flames poured out of a window of a public elementary school.

The Rabaa sit-in had evolved over time into something more like a small village: it had tented structures, some of them two-story, with electricity cribbed from street lamps; a fully operational pharmacy; and a professional-grade soundstage, from which Brotherhood figures delivered rousing speeches each night to the thousands of supporters who visited Rabaa, and another smaller site in Nahda Square, across town, every day.

Now, much of the protest site lay in tatters. The police and military, for weeks, had threatened to clear the sit-ins “by whatever means necessary,” and then—under pressure from human-rights groups and from the government itself—promised instead simply to surround the sites and wait them out, but they had suddenly opted for the most aggressive choice of all: they showed up at 7 A.M., without notice, in bulldozers and armored vehicles, and fired a barrage of tear gas and live ammunition. By the afternoon, nearly a hundred protesters, and then a hundred and forty-nine, had been counted as dead. (The real number is likely higher.)

Even outside Rabaa, the scene was a frenzy of close urban combat—tear gas and shooting, some of it rubber bullets, much of it live, automatic fire. Standing at a major intersection about a kilometre away, my colleagues and I watched as wounded combatants were ferried to a waiting bay of ambulances, at a rate of nearly one every two minutes. Shots echoed constantly off the tall apartment buildings, sounding like claps of thunder. An hour into the clashes, Ahmad Ramzi, a doctor who had volunteered to help (a stethoscope dangled incongruously from his neck), said that he had personally ferried three shooting victims to the hospital, two of them with life-threatening wounds. He didn’t know if they had made it.

Surveying the scene, it was easy to see how the death toll could be high. The Egyptian military had promised to provide a safe exit to protesters who wanted to leave once they started to move in on the sit-in, but as we looked down, there was little sign that civilians were leaving. Lina Attalah, the editor-in-chief of Mada Masr, an Egyptian online publication, who had been in Rabaa earlier in the day, later told me that navigating the roads in and out had been a petrifying experience. “You had to enter and exit running, because they set up snipers on the rooftops,” she said. “And you have to be on your own, it can’t be a group of people, because they would be targeted. It was very tricky.” (Sharif Kouddous, another reporter who made it into Rabaa, later told me that a man running next to him as he exited the sit-in was shot in the head, probably with birdshot; he survived.) At the hospital, Attalah said, bodies were piling up in the morgue because there was no way to move them out, and those suffering birdshot or non-life-threatening wounds were forced to find space on the sidewalk outside.

It didn’t have to be this way. Ever since the Egyptian military took over the country on July 3rd, in what all but the most politically cautious or legally constrained have recognized was a coup, its officers have insisted that they were operating at the mercy of a force greater than themselves. The millions of people who protested against Morsi at the end of June were the only reason they pushed him from power (and detained him in the process), they said; the move to charge Brotherhood leaders as terrorists had been imposed on them by yet another popular rally in mid-July—never mind that the general in charge of Egypt’s Army, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, had called for the people to come out and deliver such a “mandate.” And now, the decision to clear out Rabaa, the military leaders argued—in words their supporters loudly echoed—had been forced on them by the intransigence of the Brotherhood: the group, they said, refused to accede to the reality of their newfound situation, or modify their demands that Morsi be fully reinstated.

But as we sat looking at the scorched earth that had once been Rabaa al-Adawiya, it was painfully clear that Egypt’s leaders had arrived at this moment by their own doing. For the Egyptian military, this was a catastrophe of choice.

The decision to limit movement on the streets leading in and out of Rabaa was one example. The decision to abandon the political process, however incremental and frustrating, and turn instead to the police, as Karim Medhat Ennarah, a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights who focusses on the security state, told me on Wednesday, all but guaranteed a day of violence and bloodshed. “We don’t have a police force that can disperse a sit-in, especially one that big, without killing people,” he said.

Ennarah had just returned home after spending much of the day observing the clashes at Rabaa, and he was stunned to find that gun battles had broken out in the streets around his well-to-do, residential neighborhood of Heliopolis. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he told me, as he caught his breath after dashing into his apartment building. “Now there are clashes everywhere in the country, literally everywhere. I just don’t understand what they’ve been doing for two weeks. If they’ve been hesitating and planning, and they haven’t been protecting churches and preparing for this violence —what exactly have the police and Army been doing?”

It’s a question that will be asked in the days to come, and there are reasons not to be optimistic about the answers. Already, neighborhood watches and vigilante checkpoints—a regular sight in the days after the 2011 revolution—have returned to the streets. The government has responded by ordering a nighttime curfew and declaring a state of emergency, a gesture that will empower officials to take harsh action against any protests that don’t suit them. Late on Wednesday, Mohamed ElBaradei, the one figure in the military-backed Cabinet who had pressed against taking violent action at Rabaa, resigned in protest. While Baradei was taking his principled stance, his former party coalition, the National Salvation Front, released a statement that brashly “saluted” the military for its work at Rabaa. “The firm leadership of the armed forces, and the collective will of the people, demanded the dispersal of the sit-in.”

If there is hope for Egypt in the days to come, it will lie in someone, or some force, who can rise above such monolithic assessments, and can overcome the extreme polarization that plagues the country. If no one can, what is left is the lowest form of the equation, which played out today: the Muslim Brotherhood, on the streets and at war with the military—one that, so far, has chosen the hardline route.

Photograph by Mohammed Abdel Moneim/AFP/Getty.