Rival Palestinians Battle in W. Beirut Refugee Camp

Rival Palestinian groups pounded each other with machine guns, mortars and rockets today and turned a West Beirut refugee camp into a war zone. Police said at least eight people were killed and 36 wounded.

In Beirut’s southern slums, four Shia militiamen of Justice Minister Nabih Berri’s Syrian-backed Amal movement were gunned down by assailants in a speeding car. Amal blamed a rival Shia faction for the deaths.

A small car bomb exploded in the Syrian-controlled province of Batroun, 28 miles north of Beirut, wounding three people and causing some damage.

Two more people were killed in a bomb blast inside a movie theater in Beirut’s Muslim sector Thursday night.

For the second straight day, the feuding Palestinian factions attacked each other’s positions in the dusty alleys of the Chatilla refugee camp. Snipers kept many frightened residents from fleeing the camp.

‘We Can’t Take It’

“I don’t know why they are doing this to us,” cried a Palestinian woman at her home at the camp’s eastern entrance. “We can’t take it anymore. I already lost my husband in the camps war. I don’t want to lose my four children.”

The battle was between PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction--the Palestine Liberation Organization’s main guerrilla faction--and a rival Syrian-backed group, Fatah-Uprising. They traded fire with mortars, recoilless guns and rocket-propelled grenades, police said.

Police said Fatah loyalists controlled the eastern sector of Chatilla, while guerrillas of Fatah-Uprising dominated its western half close to Syrian lines.