The municipality of Choueifat, south of Beirut, on Monday criticized the government's decision to dispose of the rubble from buildings destroyed in Israeli strikes before the cease-fire with Hezbollah, at the Costa Brava coastal dump. The landfill is located on the municipality's territory.

Such a decision “cannot be carried out randomly, without a study of its environmental impact presented by the Environment Ministry and the associations concerned, and without monitoring by the Order of Engineers,” argued the municipality in a press release published by the National News Agency (NNA).

On Dece. 17, the Cabinet approved the launch of damage assessment and rubble clearance operations in the areas affected by the Israeli bombardments. A project to enlarge the Costa Brava landfill site was also approved, to enable the debris to be stored. Environmentalists, on the other hand, denounce a project to fill the sea at the Costa Brava site and at the former Saint Simon beach in Ouzai, south of Beirut, with rubble from destroyed neighborhoods in the southern suburbs.

Costa Brava is one of two official landfills created in 2016 to put an end to the waste crisis that erupted in 2015. It has already been expanded once in 2018, having reached saturation early on. The other landfill north of Beirut, Bourj Hammoud-Jdeideh, was expanded in 2021.