After three days of bloody clashes in Lebanon between Christian Phalangists and Palestinian guerrillas, fighting became general in Beirut tonight with gunfire crackling across squares and streets normally packed with pedestrians and traders. The absence of official security forces in the fighting areas - although the police pointed the guns of their antiquated armoured cars in the direction of the fighting - suggests that the Government, itself an unhappy combination of varying Lebanese factions, was unable to give authoritative direction to end the growing street warfare.
By dusk, firing was spreading through the downtown areas where the Beirut middle-class live , the port, and the uptown streets of fashionable shops. The fighting is the culmination of a confused animosity between the Palestinian guerrillas, who demand the right to be based in Lebanon to carry on their fight against Israel, and the extremist Right-wing Christian Phalangists, who feel they are expressing the will of the massive Christian and Moslem middle-class in wanting to rid Lebanon of the guerrillas.
The trouble began in April of last year, when there were widespread riots in favour of allowing the guerrillas to operate from bases in Lebanon. The Christian establishment and many conservative Moslems objected and the Government fell.
While President Helou sorted out a new Government the Palestinians consolidated their ground in the south - resulting now in the progressive evacuation of local villages. Then fighting broke out between the guerrillas and the Lebanese Army. This was ended as a result of an agreement worked out in Cairo on November 3, setting out the terms on which the Palestinians could live and operate in Lebanon. The Phalangists, who are believed to have 10, men actively under arms and , loyalists, appear to have taken the law into their own hands after a series of what they regard as provocations.
The first was when guerrillas shot up a house full of cigarette and hashish smugglers who were giving them a bad name and lost 17 men dead. They proceeded to kill three smugglers, two of whom were burned.
