Intense battle rages around Lebanon siege camp

NAHR AL-BARED (AFP) - Intense exchanges raged between Lebanese troops and Islamists holed up in a northern refugee camp on Saturday, as the army confirmed it had lost six soldiers in 36 hours of fierce fighting.

Troops were heavily pounding the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, where the army has been besieging fringe militant group Fatah al-Islam for a fortnight, an AFP correspondent said.

Machinegune fire was heard from inside the camp, while an army gunship hovered overhead as smoke billowed into the sky.

The army said it had lost three soldiers in intense exchanges on Friday, two more overnight, and another in clashes on Saturday.

A Palestinian official inside the camp said at least eight militants were also killed on Friday.

"No civilians have been wounded," Abu Imad Halwani, an official of the mainstream Fatah movement of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, told AFP, referring to the estimated 5,000 refugees trapped by the fighting in increasingly desperate conditions.

The latest fatalities took to 94 the death toll since the fighting erupted on May 20, 41 of them soldiers, in what is by far Lebanon's deadliest internal fighting since the 1975-1990 civil war.