BEIRUT, Lebanon — Sectarian tensions between supporters and opponents of the Syrian government reignited street fighting in the northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli on Saturday, with local news media reports saying at least 7 people were killed and 30 were wounded.

The fighting in Lebanon has erupted sporadically since the uprising in Syria began 15 months ago, with Tripoli a tinderbox because the same sects at odds in Syria live in adjacent neighborhoods in that port city. Fear that the Syrian conflict will spill over the border has prompted all Lebanese political factions to adopt a policy of “disassociation” from the uprising.

The fighting in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, started in earnest after a demonstration on Friday night commemorating the victims of Houla, an area near Homs, Syria, where 108 Sunni Muslims, including 49 children, were killed on May 25. Villagers accused men from nearby Alawite villages of carrying out the massacre, while the Syrian government blamed “armed gangs” financed by foreign states.

The recurring street fights in Tripoli pit Sunni Muslims, who support the Syrian uprising, against members of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam to which Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, belongs.

Political leaders in Jabal Mohsen, Tripoli’s Alawite quarter, said their neighborhood was singled out.

Rifaat Eid, the secretary general of the Arab Democratic Party, the main political arm of Lebanon’s Alawites, said that one civilian from Jabal Mohsen had died in the fighting. The Lebanese Army had previously sent troops to the city, he said, but had yet to intervene.

A Sunni fighter reached briefly by phone said the two sides were exchanging gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades.

Another Sunni fighter, who goes by the name Abu Bera, said the fighting started when Alawite militias started firing on the Sunnis after the protests on Friday. He said that seven Sunni men and one woman had been killed.

Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Qatar on Saturday issued a statement asking the two main satellite operators in the Arab world, Arabsat and Nilesat, to stop broadcasting both private and public television stations from Syria.

Syrian state-run television ran urgent red banners across the bottom of its broadcasts saying that the Arab League was trying to “hide the facts of what is happening in Syria.”

Kofi Annan, the envoy for the United Nations and the Arab League who is trying to salvage his beleaguered peace plan, told the ministers that “the specter of all-out civil war, with a worrying sectarian dimension, grows by the day.” Josh Wood contributed reporting. (Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company 06/03/12)