BEIRUT, 5 August 2007 — A Lebanese solider was killed yesterday in fighting with Al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist militants holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp in north Lebanon, security sources said.
The army has lost 131 soldiers since the battle with the Fatah Al-Islam militants erupted on May 20 at the Nahr Al-Bared camp. In total, at least 257 people have been killed in Lebanon’s worst internal violence since the 1975-1990 civil war.
Fatah Al-Islam, which split from a Syrian-backed Palestinian faction last year, has Lebanese, Palestinians and other Arabs in its ranks, including some who have fought in Iraq. It says it supports Al-Qaeda’s ideas, but has no direct links with it.
The conflict has further undermined stability in Lebanon, already crippled by a prolonged political crisis and shaken by bombings that have killed six UN peacekeepers and two anti-Syrian lawmakers in the past eight months.
The ongoing fighting prevented repair teams from reaching a nearby power plant knocked out by Katyusha rocket fire. A woman in the village of Deir Ammar where the power station is located, four kilometers (two and a half miles) from the Nahr Al-Bared camp, was wounded by another rocket fired by the militants yesterday, police said.
Loss of production at the 400-megawatt facility, one of the main power stations in northern Lebanon, has exacerbated shortages in the country, where six-hour power cuts are being experienced everywhere except in Beirut’s administrative zone.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said on Friday the United States was trying to intimidate Lebanese people by taking punitive financial action against opponents of the Western-backed Beirut government.
US President George W. Bush on Thursday ordered a freeze on the US assets of anyone Washington deems to be undermining Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s government.
