Two Palestinian children were injured on Tuesday when a grenade they were handling exploded at a school in northern Lebanon where Palestinian refugees are being temporarily housed, police said. "The two children were injured when a grenade with which the girl was playing exploded at the Dar Es-Salam school in Bab al-Tabaneh in Tripoli," a police spokesman said. He said the girl, who a medical source said was aged four, lost one of her fingers and the boy was slightly injured in the foot.The Dar Es-Salam school, located in a poor area of Tripoli, houses about 100 families from the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp which was the scene of 15 weeks of fierce battles in the summer between the army and radical Islamists.
The fighting, which ended September 2 and marked the country's worst internal violence since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war, left more than 400 people dead, including 168 soldiers. Rabih Abd Al-Halim, a refugee at the school, told AFP that he was in the same room as the girl and several other people when they heard a blast and saw her collapse screaming in pain. "She was hurt in the hand and one of her fingers was severed," he said.