NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon, July 18, 2007 (AFP) - The Lebanese army said it was closing in Wednesday on the last pockets of Islamist fighters in a battered refugee camp after two months of battles that have cost about 200 lives.

As exchanges of gunfire eased, a source at a state-run hospital in the nearby northern port city of Tripoli said it had received 39 corpses of Islamist and allied fighters since the outbreak of fighting.

A military source said the army had recovered another 35 corpses during mopping-up operations in the Nahr al-Bared camp, much of which has been reduced to mountains of rubble under a barrage of army tank and artillery fire.

The fighters of Fatah al-Islam, an Al-Qaeda-inspired group of Arab Islamists holed up in the seafront Palestinian refugee camp "are now in dispersed small pockets," an army spokesman told AFP. "The noose is tightening."

A Lebanese soldier was killed in clashes on Tuesday, raising the army's death toll to 101 in and around Nahr al-Bared and Tripoli.

The Islamists have lost at least 74 fighters, not including militants buried inside the camp by their comrades or abandoned under the rubble. Dozens of civilians are also feared to have been killed.

The fighting is the deadliest internal feuding since the 1975-1990 civil and dealt a new blow to the Western-backed government of Prime Minister Siniora as he grapples with a paralysing political crisis.

Almost all of the camp's 31,000 residents have been evacuated, as well as Palestinian militants not involved in the showdown, but the families of Fatah al-Islam fighters -- about 45 children and 20 women, according to relief workers -- remain in Nahr al-Bared.

An AFP correspondent reported light exchanges of gunfire early on Wednesday, amid sporadic shelling by the military. Unlike previous days, the militants had yet to fire off any Katyusha-type rockets.

The army has said two Fatah al-Islam members and two fighters of the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) surrendered earlier this week.

The fighting erupted when the militants launched a string of attacks on May 20 on soldiers, killing 27 troops around the camp and in Tripoli, according to the army.

The Islamists on Tuesday fired rockets, five of which struck fields without causing casualties, police said. Fatah al-Islam started firing rockets after the evacuation of the mainstream Palestinian group Fatah, having apparently seized their abandoned arsenal.

Fatah and local officials have condemned the rocket fire as acts of desperation.

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