Shias Ease Stranglehold on Refugee Camps; Gemayel Aide Freed

BEIRUT â€”  Fighting erupted again Sunday around Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, partially thwarting efforts to deliver food to starving refugees, but Shia Muslim militiamen briefly relaxed their stranglehold on one of the Beirut camps and another in southern Lebanon.

Rocket-propelled grenades and tank and mortar barrages were exchanged by Shia Amal militiamen and Palestinian guerrillas who are trapped in the Borj el Brajne and Chatilla refugee camps in southern Beirut, killing at least one Palestinian, police said.

Meanwhile, a key adviser to President Amin Gemayel was released by kidnapers and the effort to free Anglican Church envoy Terry Waite, missing for over three weeks, was intensified.

Police said that Jean Obeid, who had been abducted by gunmen on Thursday, was released unharmed in Muslim West Beirut. No group claimed responsibility for his abduction.

Gemayel, on a three-nation tour of Europe, met in London with Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe and pledged his help in seeking the release of Waite, a special envoy of Archbishop of Canterbury Robert A. K. Runcie, and an experienced hostage negotiator.

In Beirut, Druze militia chief Walid Jumblatt said he believes that Waite, 47, is being held by the Shia Muslim Hezbollah (Party of God) and appealed to this pro-Iranian group to free the Briton.

“We are still in touch with Hezbollah, and we hope that they will respond to us and release Terry Waite if he is being detained by them because this situation is impossible,� Jumblatt told the Sunni Muslim Voice of the Homeland radio.

“Some of the kidnapers thought that it was possible to squeeze some money out of his abduction,� he added.

The new flare-up around the refugee camps came shortly after Amal allowed about 30 Palestinian families, mainly women, children and elderly men, to leave Borj el Brajne early Sunday. The evacuees joined about 300 others at West Beirut’s Mar Elias camp, which is protected by Druze militiamen who have remained neutral in the four-month-old “camps war� between Amal and the Palestinians.

The Shia militia is battling to keep the Palestine Liberation Organization from rebuilding the Lebanon stronghold it maintained before the 1982 Israeli invasion.

The Palestinian evacuees were given bread and other food at a nearby Amal militia post.

“The children looked thin and weak. . . . One of the women kept saying, ‘I am sick, I need treatment, I can’t take it anymore,�’ a witness said.

Amal also eased its stranglehold on the Rashidiyeh camp in Tyre, 46 miles south of Beirut, allowing many Palestinian refugees to obtain food and medicine.