The death brought to 79 the number of people killed in the bloodiest internal clashes in Lebanon in decades which has underscored the country' s fragile security situation and created a new headache for the embattled Western-backed government.
Sporadic fighting has erupted almost on a daily basis although the fierce gunbattles of the early days of the standoff have died down amid mediation efforts to find a peaceful solution.
Fatah al-Islam' s spokesman Abu Salim Taha said the group was refusing to surrender any of its militants despite demands of the Lebanese government which has vowed to crush the " terrorist phenomenon."
" We refuse to hand over any member of Fatah al-Islam," Taha told AFP.
A three-member delegation of clerics from the Union of Palestinian Scholars met militants in the camp on Sunday after winning approval from Lebanese authorities, Palestinian factions and Fatah al-Islam to mediate.
" We are still working with the delegation of the Union of Palestinian Scholars in order to find a political solution," Taha said.
Under a longstanding arrangement, the 12 refugee camps in Lebanon remain outside government control and in the hands of armed Palestinian factions -- despite a UN resolution calling for the disarmament of all militias.
As calm returned to Nahr al-Bared, the International Committee for the Red Cross started on Tuesday to deliver eight pick-up trucks of much-needed aid to trapped residents of the impoverished shantytown near the Mediterranean coast.
" One of the eight pick-up trucks has already entered, and the rest will follow, one every 10-15 minutes," Samih Kabbara, an ICRC official on the scene told AFP.
" They are bringing in 20,000 litres of drinking water, 12 tonnes of canned food, two tonnes of candles -- or 40,000 candles," he said.
According to UN estimates, between 3,000 and 8,000 of the 31,000 Palestinian refugees registered at Nahr al-Bared are still inside, while Prime Minister Fuad Siniora said on Sunday that 5,000 remained.
The UN children' s agency UNICEF has called on all sides to protect trapped civilians, including children it said had been through " unspeakable trauma."
The fighting has been the worst since the 1975-1990 civil war, unnerving a country riven by political and sectarian division and still recovering from last year' s war between Israel and the Shiite Muslim Lebanese group Hezbollah.
The ruling majority in Lebanon has accused former power broker Syria of backing Fatah al-Islam, a Sunni Muslim group inspired by the Al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden. Damascus denies the allegations.
The group' s Palestinian leader Shaker Abssi, who surfaced in Lebanon last year after serving three years in a Syrian jail, has claimed their fight is with " Jews and Americans" and not with Lebanon.
