Truce Ignored; Lebanon Battle Spreads to Beirut Camps

Palestinian guerrillas and Shia Muslim militiamen ignored a cease-fire Friday and blasted each other with artillery, tank cannon and rocket fire.

Sources in Damascus, the Syrian capital, said a truce agreement was reached Thursday with the help of Syrian, Libyan and Iranian officials. But the boom of artillery reverberated through Beirut at 3 p.m. Friday, when it was scheduled to take effect.

Fighting that began Monday in the hills above the southern port of Sidon spread to the Palestinian camps on Beirut’s south fringe where a sporadic war has been fought for 18 months.

Columns of black smoke rose over Beirut as gunners of the Shia militia Amal poured artillery, tank cannon and mortar fire into the camps.

Answered With Rockets

Palestine Liberation Organization guerrillas responded with rockets fired from multi-barreled launchers mounted on trucks.

Hospital sources said at least 10 people were killed and 97 were wounded in battles between the PLO and Amal at the Chatilla and Borj el Brajne refugee shantytowns which are surrounded by Shia slums.

PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah guerrilla faction said its fighters drove off Amal assaults on the Chatilla camp launched behind sustained barrages of cannon fire from Soviet-built T-55 tanks supplied to Amal by its Syrian sponsors.

“The tanks tried to advance toward Chatilla. Our heroes confronted them, destroyed two tanks and forced the rest to retreat,” a Fatah statement said.

The PLO claimed in a statement issued in Nicosia, Cyprus, that Syrian artillery shelled the Beirut camps after dark from mountains east of the city. There was no independent confirmation that Syria, which has 25,000 soldiers in east and north Lebanon, had joined the battle.

Another PLO statement, from its Italian office in Rome, accused Syria, Israel and Amal of committing genocide in the refugee camps.

In the south, police said heavy fighting continued around the Christian town of Maghdousheh in the hills overlooking refugee camps outside Sidon.

Amal had set up artillery positions at Maghdousheh and Palestinian guerrillas surged out of the camps on Monday in an attempt to drive the Shias from the high ground.

A spokesman for the Syrian-backed Palestine National Salvation Front, composed of six Palestinian factions, said four of its guerrillas were killed in “ferocious” battles at the town three miles southeast of Sidon. The front opposes Arafat, but its fighters usually join Arafat’s men to defend the camps. Police said that 216 people have been killed and 441 wounded in the southern Lebanon battle this week.

Amal is trying to keep Arafat from regaining the Lebanese base he lost in the Israeli invasion of 1982. More than 1,200 people have been killed and 3,500 wounded since the Shia-Palestinian war began in May, 1985.