Beirut- Three Palestinians were killed in fighting between rival factions in a refugee camp in south Lebanon, security sources said on Tuesday. The clashes began late on Monday when gunmen shot dead a member of the Islamist Jund al-Sham militant group in Ain al-Hilweh camp, 35 kilometres south of the capital Beirut.
The killing triggered fierce exchanges of gunfire and grenades between the militants and Fatah gunmen in which a second Jund al-Sham member was killed.
Several hours after the fighting stopped, the father of a senior Fatah official was shot dead by unknown attackers.
Lebanese authorities have very little influence inside the Palestinian refugee camps, home to some 367,000 refugees.
Jund al-Sham has clashed in the past with Fatah inside the camp, which is the largest of Lebanon's 12 Palestinian refugee camps.
Jund al-Sham, believed to have first appeared in Afghanistan in 1999, was established by Syrians and Palestinians with links to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who founded al-Qaeda in Iraq and was subsequently killed in a US airstrike.
