The Palestinian gunman, his face screwed up with rage, ran towards us, raising his AK-47 and yelled, “Get your hands up! Get your hands up!” It was June 2007 and in the north of Lebanon, the Lebanese army and Fatah Al-Islam were in the early stages of a bloody battle at the Nahr Al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp — a confrontation that would last 106 days and leave 168 soldiers, over 200 militants and dozens of civilians dead. The fighting in the north clearly had unnerved the Palestinian gunman. He was a guard at the entrance of a small military base at Ain Al-Bayda, near Kfar Zabad village in the Bekaa Valley, manned by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), a Damascus-backed radical faction. The PFLP-GC runs five small bases in Lebanon: Ain Al-Bayda, Wadi Heshmesh just north of the Bekaa village of Qussaya, Jabal Al-Maaysara
