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NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon - Thousands of Palestinians fled a badly damaged refugee camp on Wednesday, reporting bodies in the streets after a fragile truce halted fighting between the Lebanese army and al Qaeda-inspired militants.
Vehicles choked the main road out of the Nahr al-Bared camp, where the Lebanese army had been battling the Fatah al-Islam militant group since Sunday in Lebanon's worst internal fighting since the 1975-1990 civil war.
"It's mass destruction in there. The dead people are strewn on the streets. Nobody is picking them up," said camp resident Awad Saeed Awad as he boarded a bus for the nearby Beddawi camp where many were seeking refuge.
"We haven't seen Fatah al-Islam. They're probably hiding in the alleyways."
The fighting has killed at least 22 militants and 32 soldiers. Camp residents have spoken of dozens of civilians dead, with bodies in the streets and buried under rubble.
An official source at Lebanon's defence ministry put the militant death toll at between 50 and 60 fighters, including fighters who died in clashes in the northern port city of Tripoli on Sunday.
A third of the camp's 40,000 residents had fled, the Red Cross said. At Beddawi camp, hundreds packed the corridors and classrooms of one school, sleeping on mattresses on the floor.
Seven schools run by the United Nations in Beddawi were full of evacuees, said Hoda Elturk, spokeswoman for UNRWA -- the UN agency which cares for Palestinian refugees.
Sitting on a mattress on the floor of one of the schools, Umm Ali said there had been no water in Nahr al-Bared.
"We were stepping on the dead bodies in the street when we escaped," she said.
The fighting eased on Tuesday afternoon following an informal truce. A military source said there was calm but added "the matter is not over".
"It will only end with the final end of this gang", he said.
Some residents had not left the camp, where aid workers were doing their best to help. "The ceasefire holds, but there is sporadic shooting every now again," UNRWA's Elturk said.
"It's very dangerous and risky to move inside the camp."
Eleven trucks loaded with food for the evacuees were due to arrive from Jordan on Thursday, an ICRC spokeswoman said.
Fatah al-Islam, a Sunni Islamist militant group led by a Palestinian, emerged in 2006 when it split from Fatah al-Intifada (Fatah Uprising), a Syrian-backed Palestinian group based in Lebanon.
The group made its base in Nahr al-Bared, one of 12 Palestinian camps which are home to some 400,000 refugees in Lebanon. The army is not allowed into the camps under a 1969 Arab agreement.
"They're a breeding ground for any type of mishap," security analyst Timur Goksel said. "You are in a sovereign country and you have these autonomous enclaves."
Small factions with similar ideologies to Fatah al-Islam, which shares al Qaeda's militant Islamist theology, have also emerged in Ain el-Hilweh camp in south Lebanon.
The government had pledged to root out Fatah al-Islam, which members of the governing coalition say is a tool of Syrian intelligence. Syria denies any link with the group.
The authorities say they have arrested Saudi, Algerian, Tunisian and Lebanese members of the group, which has little or no support among Palestinians. But army shelling has enraged camp residents.
Human Rights Watch said: "The Lebanese army must take better precautions to prevent needless civilian deaths".
"Fatah al-Islam militants must not hide among civilians," said Joe Stork, the organisation's deputy Middle East director.
- REUTERS
