Aoun in Algeria: The most urgent area where Lebanon needs cooperation is reconstruction aid.

President Joseph Aoun met Tuesday with Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune to discuss bilateral ties, focusing on Lebanon's urgent need for reconstruction aid after the war with Israel.

Alongside this visit, airline Air Algeria indicated it would resume flights to Beirut on Aug. 14, according to an announcement posted Tuesday night to Wednesday on its Facebook page. Flights will initially run between Aug. 14 and Oct. 25, the company announced, with two flights per week.

The Algiers-Beirut route had been suspended during summer 2024 amid tensions between Iran and Israel, following the assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader, an Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, and a shot that killed a dozen children on the Golan Heights annexed by Israel.

'Common Arab interest system'

At the headquarters of the Algerian presidency during his two-day visit, Aoun stressed the importance of strengthening cooperation between the two countries, with a view to a "stronger and more united Arab world."

"Relations between Lebanon and Algeria are historic" on the shores of the Mediterranean, and "the Phoenicians united us thousands of years ago," he said, in reference to the Semitic people from the first millennia before Christ, established on the Lebanese coast in a series of independent cities, and who established commercial relations and outposts as far as North Africa.

"We need a system of common Arab interest to unite us for the years to come," argued the Lebanese president, who listed the areas of cooperation between Beirut and Algiers, including energy and all economic sectors.

Lebanon and Algeria maintain friendly diplomatic relations, but their trade exchanges remain limited. Lebanon has not imported Algerian fuel since the issue of defective fuel delivered to Electricité du Liban (EDL) between 2005 and 2020 via the company Sonatrach Petroleum Corporation (SPC), a subsidiary of the Algerian national oil company. In 2024, as the public electricity provider faced a new fuel shortage, Algeria donated several tens of thousands of liters of fuel to Lebanon. In November 2024, at the peak of the war between Hezbollah and Israel, a delegation of Algerian doctors spent two weeks in Lebanon to perform surgeries in hospitals.

Reconstruction

Aoun also stressed that the most "urgent" area of cooperation today for Lebanon is aid for the reconstruction of damage from the fall 2024 war. He noted that this aid specifically includes rebuilding "government infrastructure, public networks, or destroyed homes."

"We do not want lost time or bad decisions to destroy the hopes of residents to return to their land and live there with dignity," he said.

Lebanon obtained a $250 million loan from the World Bank in early June and launched, in partnership with United Nations agencies, projects worth over $350 million for the country’s south. The war totally or partially destroyed villages in the South, the Bekaa, and southern suburbs of Beirut. The World Bank estimates the total bill for damage in areas hit by Israeli bombings in Lebanon at $11 billion. France, for its part, pledged last week to contribute $88 million for reconstruction.

The Algerian president stressed the importance of expanding relations between the two countries, notably by reactivating the work of a Lebanese-Algerian cooperation committee and strengthening coordination between business leaders from both countries.

Algiers is "always in solidarity with the Lebanese people, whatever the circumstances," he declared. He called for "an end to Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty," promising to weigh in as much as possible on the next U.N. Security Council decision on renewing the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

The Lebanese Minister of Information, Paul Morcos, and his Algerian counterpart, Mohammad Mizian, have meanwhile signed a memorandum of cooperation aimed at "supporting Lebanese public media."

Foreign Minister Joe Rajji, who accompanied Aoun during the two-day visit to Algeria, held a lengthy meeting on the sidelines with his Algerian counterpart, Ahmad Attaf.

The two ministers discussed bilateral relations and ways to strengthen cooperation across all fields, with a focus on political and economic ties.

According to Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (ANI), they agreed to reactivate the High Joint Committee between Lebanon and Algeria, which was originally established in 2002.