Nasrallah to speak for Jerusalem Day, missing rice, Mikati accused in France: Everything you need to know to start your Friday

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Catch up on yesterday’s LIVE coverage of Day 181 of the Gaza war here.

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah is set to give another address today marking “Jerusalem Day,” tackling the party’s continued border clashes with Israel as southern Lebanon’s remaining residents withstood further Israeli fire. Israeli airstrikes and artillery shells cratered across the border region while Hezbollah announced more cross-border attacks. During his last address on Wednesday, a day after Israel killed one of its members in an unprecedented strike targeting an Iranian diplomatic mission in Damascus, Nasrallah expressed unity across “resistance fronts.”

The caretaker government doubled the private sector minimum wage to the equivalent of $200 and is seeking international pressure on Israel to end attacks on southern Lebanon amid an “agricultural disaster” and European aid to curb informal migration. Caretaker Labor Minister Mustafa Bayram announced the first hike to private employees’ minimum compensation in nearly a year, weeks after the cabinet made another boost to public sector salaries under popular pressure. The same day, Parliament’s Finance and Budget Committee approved an “urgent advanced payment” of Civil Defense salary arrears awaiting a decision from cabinet on how to categorize the employees. During yesterday’s cabinet meeting, Mikati estimated that Israeli projectiles had scorched 800 hectares, killed 34,000 heads of livestock and deprived three-quarters of farmers from their last source of income — a toll which will be felt for “years,” he added. A day earlier, Cypriot Interior Minister Constantinos Ioannou expressed concern over Lebanon’s quelled ability in light of the border clashes to stop makeshift migration vessel departures. Mikati told the Cabinet that he asked Cyprus’ president, Nikos Christodoulides, to call for EU aid to Lebanon for “expelling illegally displaced persons.” Earlier the same week, the Foreign Ministry announced a campaign to categorize who among Lebanon’s Syrian population fit its criteria of “actual displaced” — threatening outliers with the dismantling of their informal dwellings and their deportation.

Nearly 191 tons of rice that failed a health inspection at the port of Beirut have disappeared, MP Melhem Khalf warned Thursday. The rice shipment unloaded last Thursday suffered a “pesticide leak” and was placed under hold awaiting further tests, Khalaf said, noting that when inspectors returned the grains had been replaced with another product and could no longer be found. MP Wael Bou Faour last year incited concern over food safety threats from smuggled non-conforming products last year, warning that some farmers had accessed and were using “unregistered pesticides.” Food safety remains a concern in Lebanon as occasional police raids uncover unfit products on shelves and in warehouses amid spotty electricity provision endangering spoilable foodstuffs

Responding to allegations of acquiring overseas assets with ill-gotten wealth, caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said such accusations were “unfounded and often politically motivated,” AFP reported. The CVPFCL [French acronym for Association of Victims of Fraudulent and Criminal Practices in Lebanon] and Sherpa, an NGO defending financial crime victims, accused Mikati of money laundering, concealment or complicity, and criminal conspiracy as part of an organized gang. The allegedly ill-gotten assets include coastal properties in France and Monaco, yachts and jets. Mikati’s response highlighted that neither he nor any member of his family had been convicted by domestic or foreign courts. Mikati, his son and his nephew in 2019 faced an illicit enrichment complaint over $14 million in Central Bank subsidized housing loans — which an adviser to the caretaker premier in June 2022 said were granted in accordance with central bank regulations. In 2021, his fraternal M1 holding group faced international criticism for acquiring a telecoms network in post-coup Myanmar. In October of the same year, he denied that his use of an offshore company to buy a Monaco property, revealed in the “Pandora papers,” was to conceal fraud. Last April, Forbes ranked Najib and Taha Mikati as the richest of Lebanon’s billionaires – a wealth that is “transparent, legitimate, and in full compliance with the law,” Mikati told AFP. Last month, the cabinet appointed lawyers to protect Lebanon’s stake over asset seizures in case of a French conviction against former Central Bank head Riad Salameh, who faces corruption charges along with several of his associates in another overseas trial by Sherpa and a Lebanese association against a public office holder. Recourse to foreign judiciary in high-profile cases has led to favorable rulings in cases against Lebanese banks applying informal capital controls since Oct. 2019 and against a company that ordered the ammonium nitrate which detonated in the devastating Aug. 4, 2020 Beirut port explosion.

At least 33,037 people have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the latest figures from the enclave’s health ministry. Hamas official Osama Hamdan said ceasefire negotiations are “stuck in a vicious circle,” after an Israeli delegation left Cairo with its latest proposal. US President Joe Biden urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “empower” his delegation of negotiators to “conclude a deal without delay.” Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, meanwhile, continued unabated by international mediation efforts to broker a deal, resolutions calling for a ceasefire, condemnations of the civilian death toll and pleas for an end to hostilities. Reporting on an Israeli strike last October that killed 106 people, including 54 children, Human Rights Watch (HRW) found no evidence of “a military target … which means that it was an [arbitrary] and illegal strike under the laws of war.” HRW’s announcement comes amid international condemnation of an Israeli strike Monday that killed seven aid workers unloading a food shipment to Gaza — attempting to circumvent Israeli restrictions and the war’s interruption of aid delivery routes in the enclave, leaving more than two million people at increasingly dire levels of starvation.

In case you missed it, here’s our must-read story from yesterday: “'Lavender,' the AI giving bombing orders in Israel's war on Gaza”

Compiled by Abbas Mahfouz