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NAHR AL-BARED (AFP) - The Lebanese government offered late Monday a truce to Islamist fighters after a second day of fierce battles that have cost at least 58 lives, as a bomb exploded in Beirut for the second straight night.

"The Lebanese army is ready to stop firing if the other side does the same. It will not open fire if it is not attacked," a government source in Beirut said, on condition of anonymity.

The offer followed indirect negotiations between the army and the splinter group Fatah al-Islam through the mediation of Jamaa Islamiya, a Sunni organisation, participants in the contacts told AFP.

The fighting had eased off by late Monday, but three soldiers were killed in an attack on an army post outside the Nahr al-Bared camp in north Lebanon, raising the overall toll to 58 dead.

Hospital and security sources gave a breakdown of the deaths: 30 soldiers, 17 Islamist fighters, 10 Palestinian civilians and a Lebanese civilian.

Lebanese troops bombarded the Islamist militiamen, accused of links to Al-Qaeda and Syrian intelligence, with tanks and heavy artillery earlier on Monday, the second day of the bloodiest internal fighting since the 1975-1990 civil war.

"The army is not only opening fire on us. It is shelling blindly. If this continues, we will carry the battle outside the (nearby port) city of Tripoli," spokesman Abu Salim Taha told AFP.

After the threat to expand the confrontation from around their camp in north Lebanon, 10 people were wounded in the second unclaimed bomb blast to target Beirut in as many nights, hospital sources said.

Police said the bomb in the upmarket residential district of Verdun in mainly Muslim west Beirut was placed under a car, setting ablaze several vehicles and damaging buildings.

A 63-year-old woman was killed and 10 people were wounded in an explosion in a Christian district of the Lebanese capital on Sunday night.

Verdun is home to Information Minister Ghazi al-Aridi, who at the time was giving a press briefing at the premier's office on an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the deadly clashes around Nahr al-Bared.

Huge plumes of thick black smoke billowed during the day into the sky over Nahr al-Bared, turned into a war zone by the battles between soldiers and Fatah al-Islam fighters, with at least nine civilians killed on Monday.

Save The Children, which supports projects in the camp located near Syria's border and the port city of Tripoli, warned that the humanitarian situation for non-combatants was "deteriorating rapidly".

Fears mounted of a humanitarian crisis in the camp, a coastal shantytown of narrow alleyways home to over 30,000 people where rescue workers struggled to evacuate the dead and wounded and buildings were bombed out and power supplies cut.

The international community condemned the violence and voiced support for the Lebanese government's efforts to restore order after 46 people were killed on Sunday alone.

"It would appear that the Lebanese security forces are working in a legitimate manner to provide a secure and stable environment for the Lebanese people, in the wake of provocations and attacks," the US State Department said.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon regards the Fatah al-Islam actions as "an attack on Lebanon's stability and sovereignty," the secretary general's spokeswoman said.

But Syria saw the turmoil as a bid to prod the UN Security Council into setting up the international tribunal to try suspects in the murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri, for which Damascus has been widely blamed.

Syria's UN Ambassador Bashar Jaafari also denied any ties between Damascus and Fatah al-Islam.

Officials had voiced fears about the plight of refugees trapped in the camp, where the Red Cross was able to evacuate about 17 people during a brief lull in the fighting on Sunday.

Doctors described seeing bodies strewn on the streets of Nahr al-Bared, which like all refugee camps in Lebanon remains outside the control of the government and in the hands of Palestinian factions.

The explosion of violence has raised fears about the stability of multi-confessional Lebanon, already in the grip of an acute political crisis.

The gunbattles erupted at dawn on Sunday after Fatah al-Islam ambushed an army post outside the camp, and spread to Lebanon's second city of Tripoli where troops staging an assault on a building where fighters were holed up.

That day, 27 soldiers and 17 gunmen were reported killed, in addition to a civilian and a refugee in Nahr al-Bared, home to about 30,000 of Lebanon's estimated 400,000 Palestinian refugees.

A security official said government forces found the bodies of 10 Islamists, including Saddam Hajj Dib who was wanted over a plot to blow up trains in Germany last July, in the building stormed on Sunday.

Officials from the main Palestinian factions which deny any links with Fatah al-Islam offered to help crush the militants in talks with Prime Minister Fuad Siniora.

But the Lebanon chief of the mainstream Fatah, Sultan Aboul Aynan, called for a halt to the army's bombardment, warning that Palestinian civilians were paying the price for the actions of "a gang of outlaws".

Siniora, whose Western-backed government has been paralysed for months by feuding between opponents of former power broker Damascus and pro-Syrian factions, has said the government is determined to enforce law and order.