Calm after Palestine camp clashes
May 20, 2003

AN uneasy calm returned to the Ain El-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon today after factional fighting the previous day left eight people dead and 25 wounded, a Palestinian source said.

Members of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, six of whom were killed in yesterday's clashes, signed a ceasefire deal with the fundamentalist groups Osbat al-Nour and Osbat al-Ansar, which appears on the US terrorist organisation list, the source said.

Tensions have been high at the camp since last year when Fatah began cracking down on Islamists with suspected links to al-Qaeda, and Muslim radicals attacked Fatah's camp headquarters in August 2002, killing a Fatah member.

The country's 12 Palestinian camps are not controlled by the Lebanese army and host an array of armed groups.

The rival groups' overnight agreement was reached after mediation by Lebanese fundamentalist Sheikh Maher Hammoud, who negotiated the withdrawal of the warring militias to either side of the camp which holds 65,000 people.


The deadly fighting, with automatic weapons and anti-tank rockets, erupted yesterday at the camp 43km south of Beirut.

Several hundred terrified refugees fled the camp during the fighting.

Osbat al-Nour leader Abdullah Shraidi was shot and seriously wounded by Fatah gunmen in the squalid camp on Saturday, and yesterday's violence began as a revenge attack