TRIPOLI, Lebanon (Reuters) – Lebanese troops stormed a Sunni Islamist militant hideout in the northern city of Tripoli on Sunday, killing seven of them, including a woman, while battles raged on at a nearby Palestinian refugee camp.

Security sources said one soldier was killed and 14 were wounded before a 10-hour siege of an apartment block reached a bloody climax. Militants killed a policeman, his 4-year-old daughter and a relative who all lived in the building.

The standoff, which began shortly before midnight, was linked to 36-day-old battles between the army and Fatah al-Islam militants at the Nahr al-Bared camp just north of Tripoli.

Two floors of the five-storey building were blackened and burned in the fighting. Holes from shells, grenades and bullets punctured its facade. A pool of blood lay on the pavement.

The violence in the north has complicated a political crisis that pits Lebanon’s Western-backed government against opponents led by the pro-Syrian Shi’ite Hezbollah and Amal factions.

The army has been struggling to crush Fatah al-Islam, which split from a pro-Syrian Palestinian faction last year with some 200 fighters. Since then the group has drawn scores of Arab jihadis, including Iraq war veterans, to its Nahr al-Bared base.

Foreign Arabs were among the dead in the Tripoli apartment siege, security sources said. It was not clear if they belonged to Fatah al-Islam or another jihadi group.

Troops barred reporters from the building for fear of booby traps. They said they had found much weaponry in the apartment.

Fatah al-Islam leaders have said they have no direct links to al Qaeda, but sympathize with it.

The clashes in the Sunni Muslim city of Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest, began when troops using information obtained from a detained Fatah al-Islam member had gone to the apartment block in the Abu Samra district. They were met with gunfire.

Hours earlier troops had found weapons in another flat.

A similar raid on a Tripoli flat on May 20 sparked the fighting in Nahr al-Bared, where 176 people have been killed in Lebanon’s worst internal violence since the 1975-90 civil war.

Witnesses said army artillery shells crashed into the camp on Sunday as the conflict entered a sixth week. Machinegun fire and grenade blasts reverberated from frontlines.

The militants retreated inside the camp last week after the army captured all its strongpoints nearby. Lebanon’s defense minister declared an end to major combat on Thursday, but said the army would besiege the camp until the militants surrendered.

Security forces are barred from entering Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian refugee camps by a 1969 Arab agreement.

The government says Fatah al-Islam is a tool Syria is using to destabilize Lebanon to try to regain hegemony there. Damascus denies this and says such groups threaten its own security.

Whether Fatah al-Islam has foreign sponsors or not, its fighters are well-armed, skilled and willing to die in what they see as a jihad, but have little Lebanese or Palestinian support.

Many Sunni Islamist groups have disowned them, while the army has gained stature as a rare national symbol in divided Lebanon.

“To all Islamists who have legitimized aiming the rifle at the chests of their compatriots, I tell you … this has nothing to do with Islam. It is strife,” Fathi Yakan, a Sunni Islamist leader who is close to Syria, said in an appeal on Sunday.