The stark reality of the three-day battle in this seaside refugee camp became apparent on Tuesday on a drive through the area during a brief but dangerous lull in the fighting.

Bodies lay in the rubble-strewn streets, some unrecovered through three days of fighting.

At the approach of a car, terrified Palestinians emerged from hiding, then scrambled for safety when snipers opened fire on them from various directions. A spontaneous demonstration against the fighting quickly ended when the demonstrators came under fire, leaving two dead and several others wounded.
Soon the crackle of heavy machine-gun fire in the distance offered an ominous warning of impending attack, and minutes later mortar shells landed on a United Nations convoy delivering badly needed food and medical supplies.
No one, it seemed, was safe from the violence.
Three days after a police raid touched off a violent confrontation between the Lebanese Army and a militant Palestinian group, Fatah al Islam, the first clear look inside the camp on Tuesday presented stark reminders of Lebanon’s bloody past.

Warnings
And ominous warnings from Palestinian groups in other camps as well as a suicide bombing in an apartment in Tripoli raised fears that the conflict could spread to other parts of the country and destabilise the already shaky government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.

Up to 40,000 Palestinians have been trapped inside Nahr al Bared with no water or electricity and dwindling supplies of food as the shelling has continued since Sunday, preventing aid groups from entering the camp.
Even when aid did arrive on Tuesday afternoon, the convoy came under mortar fire. No one was injured in the attack, a United Nations official said, but three damaged trucks were abandoned as aid workers quickly evacuated the area.

“It was worse than hell,” said Yasmin Abdel Ain, who left the camp on Tuesday night. “The army and Fatah al Islam would fire on each other, but the bombs and bullets landed on us. We were waiting for death.”
The fighting, the most serious of its kind in Lebanon since the end of the civil war in 1990, began on Sunday when security officials raided a building in pursuit of bank robbers tied to Fatah al Islam.
The Bush administration once again pointed to Syria as a source of the unrest, possibly to deflect attention from the United Nations investigation into the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, for which Syria has been blamed.