Thousands of Nahr al-Bared residents in Lebanon took advantage after Fatah al-Islam said it would “respect a ceasefire” to help residents of the Palestinian refugee camp. “Thousands of refugees - men, women and children - started fleeing on foot or by car … to take shelter in the nearby Beddawi camp,” said Hajj Rifaat, an official from the mainstream Fatah faction. UN officials at the Beddawi camp said they expected 10,000 refugees to arrive during the night. Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr reported: “Busloads of civilians are being evacuated … some of the people who are fleeing are injured and require urgent medical treatment. They are being taken to hospitals into the northern city of Tripoli.” Ibrahim Issa Dawoud, left the camp with his wife and six children. He said, “We thought this was our last chance because they will bulldoze the camp. That is why we took the risk and fled.”

The truce came to an end after a UN aid convoy waited for hours outside the camp as humanitarian organizations warned that there would be disaster if food, water, and medicines did not reach the refugees soon. The trucks entered into Nahr al-Bared and came under fire. 4 Palestinian civilians were killed, with at least 6 being critically injured before the convoy was forced to pull out.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attack on the UN aid convoy. “These actions constitute an assault on Lebanon’s stability and sovereignty, and have seriously endangered civilians. They must halt immediately,” Michele Montas, Ban’s spokeswoman, said in a statement. The Arab League also condemned the attacks, calling them “criminal and terrorist acts committed by the so-called terrorist group Fatah Islam against the army, Lebanese security forces and innocent citizens.”

“There is very clearly a big demand for assistance in the camp at the moment. Water is a major issue, food and medical supplies will be a major issue very soon,” Sven Berthelsen of UNRWA, the agency that cares for Palestinian refugees, told Al Jazeera.

“We are very concerned about the potential spread of disease as sanitational systems are not functioning problems and water supplies are not adequate.”…

…Omar Keenan, a doctor in one of the camp’s medical centers, told Al Jazeera the situation was a “disaster”.

“There are severe casualties. We are in need of blood, our blood bank is empty. We are performing operations on the floor. These medical centers have come under fire and people are crying out for help. We have no ability to cope. The number of casualties is in the hundreds.”

More than 80 people since Sunday have been killed in the country’s worst internal violence since the 1975-1990 civil war.

The US state department said it was considering providing financial support for this conflict to the Lebanese army, though it’s our support which created this mess in the first place. Sean McCormack, state department spokesman, described the violence as “a tough fight against a brutal group of violent extremists”. However, he didn’t explain that the violence is blowback from the influence we’ve already had in the country. Luckily, we have Seymour Hersh to explain it below.

Pro-Western officials in Lebanon continue to associate the fighters with al-Qaeda and Syria in an attempt to cover the fact that it was they who formerly supported the group with American and Saudi money. The 40,000 Palestinian civilians living in Nahr al-Bared are now caught in the crossfire, reportedly running out of supplies as the refugee camp remains under siege. This is the too-familiar result of an American foreign policy that creates conflicts in which both US-backed sides lose.

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