NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon, 19 June 2007 — The Lebanese Army lost three more soldiers yesterday as it closed in on die-hard Islamist militants in a camp in north Lebanon while a blast killed two Islamists at a southern camp.
The three soldiers were killed while clearing ordnance in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr Al-Bared where the army has besieged Fatah Al-Islam fighters in a battle that has left 138 dead, including 71 soldiers, since May 20.
As the army battled Fatah Al-Islam in the camp near the northern port city of Tripoli, the search pressed on for the militants who fired rockets into Israel on Sunday. Two Palestinian members of Jund Al-Sham — which clashed with the army earlier this month — were killed yesterday in an explosion near the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein El-Hilweh in south Lebanon, hospital sources told AFP.
Three more people were wounded by the blast in Sidon’s Taamir neighborhood near Ein El-Hilweh where Jund Al-Sham clashed with the army on June 4, killing two soldiers and two Islamists.
In northern Lebanon, troops continued to bombard Nahr Al-Bared where troops have destroyed or seized control of at least six main Fatah Al-Islam positions in the past 48 hours, an army spokesman said. He said the three soldiers were killed “while the army was clearing an area of ordnance,” and added that troops found “the bodies of several armed elements which had been apparently prepared for burial at the abandoned positions.”
Mediator Sheikh Mohammed Hajj said he was in contact with the army in a bid to enter Nahr Al-Bared and secure a unilateral cease-fire from the militants. The authorities have refused to negotiate with Fatah Al-Islam, insisting they surrender.
Around 2,000 Palestinian refugees are believed to be still sheltering inside the camp, home to 31,000 people before the eruption of Lebanon’s deadliest internal strife since the 1975-1990 civil war.
The fighting raged as Lebanese Army and UN peacekeepers were on full alert in the south a day after rockets hit Israel for the first time since it fought last year’s devastating war against the Lebanese Shiite resistance group Hezbollah.
The attack on Kiryat Shmona caused no injuries and only minor damage, but it raised tensions in Lebanon, already reeling from deadly bombings, the Fatah Al-Islam siege and continuing political paralysis. Armored vehicles of both the Lebanese Army and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) patrolled along the border with Israel, an AFP correspondent said.
Israel said Hezbollah was not behind the attack, which it blamed on an unnamed Palestinian organization. Hezbollah itself also denied responsibility. The Beirut government vowed to track down those responsible. “The state, through all its security services, will not spare any effort to find the party behind this act which aims at destabilizing (Lebanon),” Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said.
Meanwhile, the UN Security Council has asked the UN panel investigating the assassination of Lebanese ex-Premier Rafik Hariri to help Beirut in its probe into last week’s murder of anti-Damascus Lebanese MP Walid Eido.
The vocal critic of Syria’s role in Lebanon was killed along with nine other people in a Beirut seafront bombing on Wednesday, the latest in a string of killings the ruling coalition has blamed on Damascus.
