Philippine troops killed two armed insurgents who attacked an aid convoy en route to typhoon-devastated Tacloban on Tuesday, the military said, as soldiers were deployed to quell looting by hungry survivors.

Bodies still littered the streets of the city, where the United Nations fears 10,000 people could have died when the category-five Typhoon Haiyan struck on Friday.

Thousands of people whose homes were destroyed by one of the most powerful typhoons on record were spending yet another day in misery as troops established checkpoints to try to restore order and allow much-needed aid to percolate through.

Some of that aid fell victim to one of the Philippines' long-running insurgencies when 15 communist rebels ambushed trucks on their way to the storm-wracked region, a local commander told AFP.

"There were no casualties on the government side," Lieutenant-Colonel Joselito Kakilala said, adding that two members of the New People's Army, the militant wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, were killed and another wounded in the clash in Matnog town, some 240km from Tacloban.

In the city itself, a curfew was in force as armoured vehicles and elite security forces patrolled streets where famished survivors had raided stores and ransacked other aid convoys.