The Lebanese army has tightened the noose around seven Palestinian faction bases close to the Syrian border.

The move comes amid claims by a Palestinian faction leader that his men are holding six Lebanese soldiers captive and a report by the UN envoy calling for action to disarm the fighters.

Officers said about 500 soldiers backed by 50 armoured cars were now deployed around the camps in the foothills of the Anti-Lebanon range that marks the border, two operated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and five by Fatah-Intifada.

Troops on Thursday were seen manning checkpoints on all access roads to the bases and operating armoured patrols on the tracks linking PFLP-GC bases in Sultan Yacub and Kfarazabad to those of Fatah-Intifada around Halwa, 15km away.

"We have cut off all the Palestinian bases' supply routes and the land links between them," one Lebanese officer said, asking not be identified.

"We have also deployed troops on eight dirt tracks used by the Palestinians to bring in men and materiel from Syria."

The immediate trigger for Wednesday's deployment around the bases was the murder of a surveyor working for the Lebanese military the previous day, which commanders blame on fighters from Fatah-Intifada.

Soldiers detained?

In a new twist to the stand-off, PFLP-GC leader Ahmad Jibril said in comments published on Thursday that his men were holding six soldiers captive.

"We detained six Lebanese soldiers, one of them an officer, after they approached one of our positions in Kfarazabad on Wednesday," Jibril was quoted as saying in an interview with the Beirut daily An-Nahar.

"We notified the Lebanese army ... and maybe we will be able to settle the issue in the evening (Thursday)."

A military source in Beirut denied that any soldiers had been captured and said the high command would be putting out a statement. But the communique was later cancelled.

Jibril also charged that the army had detained three PFLP-GC fighters, one of them a commander, but he gave no details about the circumstances of their capture.

The siege of the Palestinian bases came as UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen presented a report in New York charging that the continued presence of armed Palestinian fighters in Lebanon violated a Security Council resolution adopted in September last year.

That text called for the withdrawal of all foreign troops, eventually prompting Syria to end a 29-year military presence in April, as well as the disarmament of all militia groups, Lebanese or Palestinian.

PHOTO CAPTION

A Lebanese army soldier looks through binoculars at a pro-Syrian Palestinian militant base, unseen, as other soldiers look on, in the southeastern village of Helweh, close to the Syrian border, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005. (AP)