Laravel 4 Internal Server Error 500 on Hostgator - .htaccess

Question

I have a Laravel 4 app deployed on shared Hostgator server.
When I navigate to:
http://mydomain.com/laravel/public/
I can see the Laravel splash screen.
but when I try to access any other route to, say, /users or /posts I am getting
Internal Server Error 500
http://mydomain.com/laravel/public/posts
Controller:
public function index()
{
$posts = $this->post->all();
return View::make('posts.index', compact('posts'));
}
In Routes.php:
Route::resource('posts', 'PostsController');
I use Jeffrey Way's Generator to scaffold the posts entity.
The same works fine on my local machine. Controllers don't contain any logic, they only output the fetched data.
Error logs are empty.
Any ideas what to check? .htaccess, maybe?
Here is what I have there:
AddType application/x-httpd-php53 .php
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Answer 1

As mentioned in comments, a 500 error without a corresponding log file entry from the application logger is likely an .htaccess file issue.
Since the OP found the issue is related to the rewrite (and not the directive to use php 5.3):
Since this is probably a common issue on Hostgator, you should check with their help docs.
However, my first stab at a fix would be to add a RewriteBase directive:
RewriteBase /
So it would look like:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>
Note that this assumes you're running the web application form the web root and not a sub-directory.