Last update - 00:00 06/06/2007
Palestinians deploy in Lebanese refugee camp to stop violence
By The Associated Press
A Palestinian security force fanned out in two neighborhoods of the Ain el Helweh refugee camp near Sidon in southern Lebanon Wednesday to prevent a renewal of clashes between Islamic militants and Lebanese troops that have so far claimed three lives.
Some 40 men, carrying automatic rifles, from various Palestinian factions in the camp deployed in Taamir and Taware neighborhoods that were the scene of clashes Sunday and Monday between Jund al-Sham Islamic militants and Lebanese troops ringing the country's largest refugee camp.
The calm that followed Sunday's clashes, in which two soldiers and a militant were killed, continued to hold Wednesday as the combined force of secular and Islamic groups took up positions in the neighborhoods.
Loudspeakers urged people to reopen stores and resume normal life in the camp. Some of the several thousand refugees who had fled the fighting to nearby areas of Sidon, the provincial capital of southern Lebanon, began returning Wednesday.
The army reopened its checkpoints around the camp for traffic.
But in northern Lebanon, where the army is fighting Fatah Islam militants barricaded in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared, sporadic exchanges continued Wednesday.
Concerns are rising that the fighting in the north, which began May 20 and intensified with an army offensive since Friday, could spread to more of Lebanon's 12 Palestinian camps, embroiled in similar factional rivalries that plague the Gaza Strip.
Under a nearly 40-year-old arrangement granting Palestinians authority to rule themselves, Lebanese troops do not enter Palestinian refugee camps -crowded towns with schools, clinics and markets that have also harbored militants and outlaws.
Four bombs have exploded in residential and commercial neighborhoods in the Beirut area since the fighting began, killing one person and wounded more than 40 people. A bomb was found and dismantled Wednesday on a public beach in the southern port city of Tyre.
The violence at Ain el Helweh, with 65,000 residents, erupted when Jund al-Sham - sympathetic to Fatah Islam - clashed with Lebanese soldiers Sunday night and Monday morning.
At Nahr el-Bared, more Fatah Islam fighters reportedly surrendered to a major Palestinian faction.
Maj. Gen. Khaled Aref, a senior commander of the major Fatah group of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Ain el Helweh, said Wednesday on Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. television that a total of about 20 Fatah Islam fighters have surrendered to his group in the southern part of besieged Nahr el-Bared.
The surrenders were the first time a major Palestinian group responded to calls by Lebanese authorities to campaign against Fatah Islam.
It coincided with Abbas' renewed denunciation of the group, whose few hundred members embrace al-Qaida-style militancy and doctrine and are suspected of having links to Osama bin Laden's network.