The body of Faisa Wehbi, 65, a victim of the Lebanese army's relentless shelling of the coastal refugee camp of Nahr Al Bared, was discovered only nine days later by Palestine Red Crescent relief workers who managed to retrieve her rotting corpse.

"Starving cats had been gnawing away at the flesh on her neck," says relative Attica Wehbi, 26, seated in the Green Lebanon Bakery in Beddawi camp, at a safe distance of some 20 kilometers (12 miles) away.

"We buried her in Beddawi," a camp which has doubled in population since Nahr Al Bared's dispossessed and displaced population of 31,000 fled after the army and Fatah Al Islam militants declared all-out war May 20.

While the known death toll stands at around 200, many more bodies - some of civilians, but mostly of Arab Islamist fighters - are believed to have been abandoned under the rubble as the battle rages on.

Almost all Palestinian civilians have been evacuated, as have militants not involved in the showdown, but the families of Fatah Al Islam - about 45 children and 20 women, according to relief workers - face a terrible dilemma.

Evacuation operations have been stalled since Wednesday, when relief workers tried in vain to rescue the fighters' families, who then failed to turn up at an agreed meeting point just inside the camp.

Eight weeks into the battle, the military charges that "the terrorists ... continue their inhuman behavior by preventing members of their families from leaving the camp."

A Palestinian source at Beddawi says it was the wives who refused to evacuate. "The wives said they want to die with their husbands," according to the source involved in arranging evacuations.

Khalil Abdel Al, 35, now an unemployed butcher whose business and home have been destroyed, understands their predicament.

"They are afraid to leave to face the threat of the Lebanese army ... If what happened to us was bad, what will happen to them?" he asks, referring to cases of abuse and humiliation suffered by the displaced Palestinians, as documented by rights activists.

Mahmoud Ghanumi, 20, was among dozens of Palestinian demonstrators who suffered army bullet wounds - two protesters were killed - when the displaced refugees held a symbolic protest June 29 outside the gates of Beddawi to demand the right to return to Nahr Al Bared.

"I was even interrogated by the army while I was lying in bed in hospital," he says, complaining that young men sheltered in Beddawi are not being allowed by the army to venture outside the confines of the camp.

But among Abdel Al and the youths sitting and smoking nargileh water pipes on the shaded patio of a modest Beddawi teashop, there is no love lost for the Al Qaeda-inspired Islamists from Algeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other Arab states.

"They have destroyed our homes, our jobs, our lives," he says, and remains skeptical of pledges that a better, new Nahr Al Bared would be built once the demolition was over.

At another branch of the Green Lebanon Bakery, this time just a few hundred meters from the black smoke of battle, normal life continues on the edge of the war-zone.

Amid the dull thud of tank shells detonating, sharp bursts of small arms fire, and glass vibrating from explosions, Lebanese shop assistant Dallal Suleiman, 30, appears unfazed by her job near the Nahr Al Bared frontline.

"We get no danger money for working here. But, thank God, we have everything we need," she says.

For journalists posted on the upper floors and rooftops of apartment blocks facing the camp across a northern highway, the sea view improves by the day as the buildings used by Fatah Al Islam snipers slowly crumble under the tank and artillery barrage. -AFP