Tires set on fire during a protest on the road connecting Abdé to Halba, in the Akkar region of northern Lebanon, on May 20, 2026. Photo shared by Michel Hallak.
NORTH LEBANON — Protesters briefly blocked the road linking Abdeh to Halba on Wednesday morning, at the level of the towns of Deir Dloum and Majdala in Akkar (North Lebanon), using burning tires, our correspondent in the region reports. The same road was already blocked on Tuesday evening in reaction to the proposed amnesty law, which is expected to be adopted during the plenary session of Parliament scheduled for Thursday at 11 a.m. and which is deemed "unjust and inequitable" by relatives of Islamist detainees.
The road was reopened by the army, which removed the tires obstructing the public way. The renewed protest, launched at 7 a.m., caused massive traffic jams since the blocked road is vital in the area, obliging motorists to use secondary roads in the Akkar plain.
On Tuesday, protest movements were reported in several regions of Lebanon, notably in Tripoli, Akkar, in the border town of Arsal (Baalbeck-Hermel), as well as in Khaldeh, south of the Lebanese capital, to denounce the proposed general amnesty law, approved by the joint parliamentary committees after several weeks of debate, with modifications taking into account the demands of the main stakeholders, including the Lebanese Army.
The debate led to significant changes in the text, particularly concerning detainees sentenced to death, a sentence that has not been carried out since 2004. They will now serve 28 years of imprisonment (calculated as nine months per year) behind bars. As for prisoners sentenced to life, their sentence is now reduced to 17 years of imprisonment. Naturally, several so-called "Islamist" detainees could benefit from this new provision of the law, as desired by some leading figures in the Sunni community, except that the proposed text stipulates that the law will not apply if the families of murder victims do not waive their personal right.
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