By Daniel Williams,  Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) — The shooting death of a Shiite Muslim youth in Beirut increases the risk of converting Lebanon’s political power struggle into a sectarian conflict. Portraits of Ali Ahmed Mahmoud, 20, who died during a Shiite-Sunni Muslim street fight yesterday, hung at downtown plazas occupied by Hezbollah, the Shiite party that is campaigning to topple Lebanon’s pro-Western government. Placards declared Mahmoud a martyr.

Army units appeared at intersections that separate Shiite and Sunni areas. A row of a dozen armored personnel vehicles topped with recoilless rifles lined a boulevard between KasKas, the scene of the killing, and the Shiite neighborhood of Dahiyeh. “We don’t know what is going to happen next,” said Hamed Jabasini, 40, a chocolate merchant. “This is something the leaders bring to us by their politics.”

The opposition protests, aimed at toppling Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, began Dec. 1 One of the main opposition is. Hezbollah’s militia triggered war with Israel in July when it abducted two Israeli soldiers. The party wants to get more say in government and divert Lebanon from close ties with the U.S. Iran and Syria back Hezbollah in this quest. The Bush administration supports Siniora and regards Hezbollah as a terrorist tool of the governments in Tehran and Damascus.

AP, Dec 4, 2006 Nearly two months after the rest of its army left southern Lebanon, Israel agreed yesterday to pull its few dozen remaining soldiers from the Lebanese part of a village divided by the border, yielding control to U.N. peacekeepers. The move came as Israel’s Cabinet discussed the three-day-old siege of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s government by pro-Hezbollah demonstrators in Beirut. Commentators here called the troop pullout a diplomatic gesture aimed at shoring up Siniora’s position, but some said it would be of little help.

Israeli officials are alarmed by the crisis in Lebanon, fearing that a collapse of the moderate regime could bring to power an Iranian proxy state on Israel’s northern border and lead to another war like the inconclusive 34-day conflict last summer with Hezbollah.

BRUSSELS, Belgium: The European Union’s foreign policy chief said Monday he backed Lebanon’s embattled Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, who faces protests by supporters of the Hezbollah movement seeking to bring down the government.

"Prime Minister Saniora has done a good job," Javier Solana told reporters. "There is a constitutional government, which came from free elections and is behaving in our opinion in a very positive manner."

The standoff between Saniora and the Hezbollah-led opposition turned violent Sunday leaving a Shiite man dead from gunshot wounds and 21 others injured. Soldiers and police, backed by tanks and armored vehicles, surrounded government headquarters in a protective cordon.

Washington