A street corner in downtown Beirut. (Credit: João Sousa/L'Orient Today/File photo)
Want to get the Morning Brief by email? Click here to sign up.
Hirings, maintenance and new equipment are among the measures to streamline the arrival of “an average of 36,000 passengers a day” to Beirut’s congested international airport, caretaker Transport Minister Ali Hamieh announced yesterday. Hamieh did not give a timeline for the implementation of the new measures, which include mobilizing dozens of new employees for maintenance work and speeding up the verification of travel documents, boosting the number of scanners to nine, opening two additional customs lanes, and deploying an additional generator to power the defunct air conditioning system. Built in 1998, the airport's current and only terminal can handle 6 million passengers a year. This capacity has been repeatedly exceeded since 2013, according to airport figures, with a peak of 8.8 million passengers in 2018 and 7.2 million expected this year.
Two brothers shot dead on Saturday near Lebanon’s highest peak were buried in Bsharri yesterday, while around 20 people have been arrested in relation to the deaths which provoked outrage among political and religious leaders. Lawyer Tony Chidiac told L'Orient Today that some 20 people from the Dennieh region have been arrested and six people from Bsharri are currently being questioned as witnesses in the case. The circumstances of the deaths remain unclear. The shooting took place in an area disputed between the inhabitants of Bsharri and Bkaasafrine, an area of Dennieh.
The Lebanese Foreign Ministry and Hezbollah condemned the Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the north of the occupied West Bank which killed at least eight Palestinians and injured over 50 others. About 3,000 people fled the camp for safety. The ministry called on "the international community, once again, to assume its responsibility to put pressure on the aggressor to stop the aggression and protect defenseless civilians.” Hezbollah extended their “condolences” to the “Palestinian people and their resistance factions” and affirmed their “absolute support.” Earlier this year, an Israeli police raid on Al-Aqsa escalated into rocket exchanges between Gaza and Israel led to Israeli air strikes targeting alleged Hamas targets in southern Lebanon — supposedly responsible for dozens of rockets fired towards it from Lebanese territory.
Hannibal Gaddafi, son of late Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi, is in “critical condition” after his hunger strike, Dubai-based Al-Hadath TV reported on Sunday. On June 2, Gaddafi went on hunger strike "because he considers himself innocent of the allegations against him and that he is a political prisoner," announced his lawyer Paul Romanos. Gaddafi has been imprisoned in Lebanon since 2015 for allegedly concealing information on the 1978 disappearance of Lebanese Shiite Imam Musa al-Sadr and two others during a visit to the Libyan capital.
In case you missed it, here’s our must-read story from yesterday: “Hanin Ghaddar: ‘Hezbollah has found other funding channels in the new cash economy’”
Compiled by Abbas Mahfouz