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The recent fighting between the Lebanese army and Islamist militants at the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp was possibly the worst internal violence in Lebanon since the civil war ended in 1990. About one year ago, peace in Lebanon was shattered after militants with Hezbollah, the Iran-supported terrorist group, killed three Israeli soldiers and took two others as hostages near the Israeli border. That set off eight weeks of violence in the region. Four thousand rockets and countless bombs later, 162 Israelis and more than 1,000 Lebanese were dead, and billions of dollars in property were destroyed. Hezbollah still has the hostages.

Such violence is taking place in a unique country in the Middle East, the nation with the highest percentage of Christians in the region. That percentage is falling, as it is elsewhere in the region, but Christians were the majority until 40 years ago. At the village level, Christian and Muslim relationships sometimes go back generations. One cannot understand Lebanon's situation without taking into account its distinctive religious environment.

Beirut-based journalist Rami Khouri, a Palestinian-Jordanian Christian, reported on and lived through the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. An American citizen, he is editor-at-large of The Daily Star, the largest English-language newspaper in the Middle East. He is also director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.

Journalist Charles Strohmer interviewed Khouri several times during the last few months in order to understand recent events and the political-religious interplay between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon.

The suffering of Palestinians in refugee camps is awful, and it speaks volumes that a militant group would hole up there and make matters worse rather than better.

It was inevitable that there would be some kind of confrontation at this Palestinian camp because this group, Fatah al-Islam, has been getting a foothold there since last year. Its members are from many different countries. They are not really a spin-off of al Qaeda, but more of a first cousin, in that they share the same ideology.

One of the lessons is that if you leave the situation of Palestinian refugees unresolved for five or six decades, you're going to get this kind of complication. Sovereignty is not clear in these camps, and bad guys with deviant behavior can get in and take hold.

Have things gotten better or worse since the Hezbollah-Israeli war last year?

Politically, it's become much more complicated, and probably worse, because you've got two or three things happening at once. There's the internal political struggle between the government and the opposition, and there's the complications with the Islamist militant groups, like Fatah al-Islam, which the Lebanese army has been fighting.

You've also got rising tension with Syria, because of the U.N. Security Council's approval of the international tribunal to try the people accused of killing former Prime Minister Hariri. These are issues that have to be confronted. But it's going to be bumpy for a while.

How have Lebanese church leaders influenced national reform and the peace effort?

The Maronite church in particular, which is the biggest denomination in Lebanon, has played an important role in recent years, providing leadership when political groups in the country were quite fragmented.

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August 2007, Vol. 51, No. 8