Palestinians Use Tunnels in Battling Shias

Palestinian guerrillas, fighting from a maze of tunnels linking three besieged refugee camps, battled furiously with Shia Muslim forces Friday and said the Shias would win only “by walking over our dead bodies.”

With the siege in its sixth day, Palestinian sources said a Syrian cease-fire plan was rejected as unacceptable and one Palestinian group said it had formed suicide squads to help defend the camps.

Police and hospital reports said at least 250 people had been killed and 1,300 wounded since what the Lebanese press has dubbed “the war of the camps” broke out last Sunday night. Each side has blamed the other for the conflict.

Hundreds of other Palestinian men have been rounded up and held in a Shia “detention center” amid reports by witnesses that the Shia militia, Amal, has executed some prisoners and viciously beaten wounded Palestinians.

Fighting Engulfs Camps

The fighting last week has engulfed the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps--where hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims were massacred in September, 1982, by pro-Israeli Lebanese Christian militiamen--and the Borj el Brajne camp in mainly Muslim West Beirut.

“We are very short of food and water,” a Palestinian official said in one of the camps. “There are also some 200 dead, including women and children, still in the streets of Sabra that we and the Red Cross cannot reach.”

Fears of an epidemic were increasing because the heavy rocket, tank, machine-gun and anti-aircraft fire had kept rescue workers from entering the camps to retrieve the decomposing bodies.

Amal gunmen supported by Shia army troops in French-made tanks tried to clear out pockets of resistance in Sabra and Chatilla Friday night and also attempted an all-out assault on Borj el Brajne, the biggest of the three Palestinian refugee camps under siege.

“They are trying but will not get through,” one Palestinian source declared at a position near the capital’s international airport, which remained closed by the fighting for a second day in a row.

The violence and cease-fire offer came as the An Nahar newspaper, quoting French Embassy sources, said two unnamed French residents of Beirut were abducted Wednesday, raising to 10 the number of Western kidnap victims missing in Lebanon. Five Americans are among them.

Palestinian sources said the cease-fire proposal by Syria, which has backed both the Palestinians and the Shias, was rejected because it called for the guerrillas to surrender their guns to a mainly Shia army unit fighting alongside Amal gunmen.

“We will never surrender our weapons,” said a Palestinian spokesman. “The only way they can overrun the camps is by walking over our dead bodies.”

Nabih Berri, the Shia leader whose sect has become the largest of Lebanon’s six main religious groups, has vowed to block the return to the camps of guerrillas loyal to Yasser Arafat, whose Palestine Liberation Organization held a tight grip on Lebanon until its defeat by Israel in 1982.

In Tehran, Iranian President Ali Khamenei blamed Israel for the violence, saying it was part of a “conspiracy by the Zionists against the Muslim peoples of the region,” Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency said.

Besieged Palestinian fighters, using an elaborate network of tunnels linking the sprawling camps, battled street-by-street Friday with the combined forces of Amal gunmen and the Lebanese army’s mainly Shia 6th Brigade.

“The Palestinians are hiding in the ground,” one Amal militiaman said. “Every time we begin to bulldoze a building to stop the Palestinians coming back, they jump out of their tunnels and start firing at us.”

Palestinian gunners in the Druze Muslim-controlled hills east of Beirut fired scores of shells and rockets into Shia military positions and residential neighborhoods for a third day, Beirut radio reported.

In Damascus, the hard-line Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said it had formed “suicide groups to fight in defense of the camps.” Palestinian sources said the report was true but it could not be independently confirmed.