Thousands of people at a besieged Palestinian refugee camp used a break in the fighting between encircling army troops and militants inside to flee the three-day bombardment, reporters and witnesses said Tuesday.
Associated Press reporters at the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp said the massive exodus began at about 9 p.m. during a lull in the fighting between the Lebanese army and the Fatah Islam militant group of Sunni Muslims.
Refugees were seen raising white towels or white plastic bags from windows. Boys carried babies, and a young boy and a woman helped an elderly woman as cars sped past carrying more refugees.
"There are a lot of dead and wounded in the houses; our homes are being destroyed on our heads," said a young refugee woman in a blue veil quoted by the AP.
A man angrily interrupted her: "There's been a massacre; I witnessed it."
He said he had seen 10 civilians killed in one room. "Six shells fell on us; the bodies were cut to pieces," he told the news agency.
U.N. relief officials in another camp located a few miles to the south of Tripoli said they expected 10,000 Palestinian refugees from Nahr el-Bared to arrive throughout the night.
Reports from inside the camp, where the army laid siege Sunday, said the 31,000 people were running out of water.
Earlier, a U.N. relief convoy trying to deliver water, among other things, was caught in the crossfire. A U.N. Relief and Works Agency official quoted by AP on condition of anonymity said there may have been one or more casualties.
The official said a pickup truck and a water tanker were caught between the lines of the Lebanese army and the militant Fatah Islam fighters and were hit as they entered the camp, but it was not clear where the fire had come from.
"We hear a lot of bombs and shooting," Mira Minkara, a resident of Tripoli, Lebanon, told NPR's Day to Day. "We thought it would stop once [the army] surrounded the camp."
"We didn't think [the militants] would be so strong and so stubborn about holding themselves in this building," she said.
It was the third day of the siege in which soldiers perched on a nearby hill fired artillery and machine guns into the camp.
Overnight, the government ordered the army to finish off the militants in the camp, home to 31,000 Palestinian refugees. At least 50 combatants have been killed since fighting erupted Sunday.
Militants in the camp, believed to number a few hundred, were reportedly returning fire. It was the worst internal fighting in Lebanon since the country's civil war ended in 1990.
Black smoke billowed from the area at the Nahr el-Bared camp on the outskirts of the port city of Tripoli while the U.N. Relief and Works Agency scrambled to evacuate one of its employees, a Palestinian aid worker wounded Monday, Taleb al-Salhani of UNRWA said.
Lebanese soldiers stopped six UNRWA trucks, including a water tanker, saying it was too dangerous to enter the camp. Al-Salhani said he hoped for a cease-fire later in the day to allow the U.N. convoy through.
Inside the city itself, security forces moved in against a suspected Fatah Islam hideout in an apartment building, witnesses said.
The government is determined to pursue Islamic militants who have staged attacks on the Lebanese army since Sunday, killing 29 soldiers. About 20 militants have also been killed, along with an undetermined number of civilians.
Lebanon's Cabinet late Monday authorized the army to step up its campaign and "end the terrorist phenomenon that is alien to the values and nature of the Palestinian people," Information Minister Ghazi Aridi said.
From NPR and Associated Press reports.
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