Mrayjeh mayor denies rumor claiming that Hezbollah destroyed documents from municipality

BEIRUT — The mayor of Mrayjeh in Beirut's southern suburbs, Samir Bou Khalil, denied on Friday a rumor claiming that Hezbollah members destroyed municipality documents, according to the state-run National News Agency.

On Thursday, Paris-based Lebanese journalist Maya Khadra claimed that she discovered that Hezbollah bulldozed the municipality of Mrayjeh to destroy archives and cadastral registers.

Moreover, former Free Patriotic Movement Baabda MP Hikmat Dib told MTV channel that Hezbollah recently razed Mrayjeh's municipality, adding that the reason behind that remains unclear. Dib even claimed that the mayor of Mrayjeh told him that the municipality's documents and archives were lost. Citing the mayor, he added that Hezbollah members told Bou Khalil that there is "something" under the municipality.

Reacting to these claims, Bou Khalil said on Friday that he sent workers to remove documents from the municipality and put them in a safe location, adding that this was done due to concerns that the building could collapse with the onset of the winter season, as it had sustained damage from Israeli airstrikes.

“After a series of Israeli airstrikes that targeted the Mrayjeh area, specifically in the vicinity of the municipality, the head of the department in the municipality Mohammad Nabouh informed me that with the beginning of the winter season, the municipal building may collapse completely and asked me to demolish the building in advance but I refused and told him that as a precautionary measure and to preserve the municipality's documents and the public interest, I sent workers to remove the documents in the presence of Hezbollah members who helped the municipality workers move the majority of the documents", the mayor said.

"I emphasize the need to investigate and verify information before publishing it, especially in light of the difficult circumstances that the country is witnessing", he added.

Ghobeiry's mayor, Maan Khalil, told L'Orient Today on Friday that Ghobeiry's municipality, situated close to Mrayjeh, digitized its documents to protect them from Israeli airstrikes targeting the area. 

The conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, which started in Oct. 2023, escalated in September when the Israeli army launched an intensified and wide-scale attack on Lebanon. In recent days, Israel increased its attacks on the southern suburbs of Beirut in parallel with the beginning of the second phase of the Israeli ground operation in South Lebanon.