Jubilee Post News & Views
Abhigyan Shekhar
Tuesday evening around 8:30 while the Indian media was busy with the countdown of the bhumipujan of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, a devastating news came from the Lebanese capital of Beirut where 2 explosions shook the entire city and by the midnight killed 70 and left 3000 injured, while Lebanon is busy failing to fight the coronavirus and lift up it’s economy this additional pressure on the hospitals, which were already going through shortage of supplies, has left the city in Chaos. While the world comes out to support and pray for the people in Lebanon, we have some questions to ask.
The explosion took place just a day after former foreign minister NashifHitti resigned from the post citing the failure of the present administration in getting Lebanon out of problem and taking it towards becoming a failed state.
The people of Lebanon last year came out against the government’s plan to tax applications such as Whatsapp and other basic necessities like gas and Tobacco, these protests led to the resignation of former leader Saad Hariri in October but even the resignation could not stop the protests since Hasan Diab the former education minister, who was also one of those few targeted politicians by the protestors, was “elected” as the Prime minister in January 2020. It is widely known that Diab is backed by Hezbollah, the same organization which the Israel accuses of planning attacks against it and the white house has listed as a terrorist force.
The initial reports according to the government said that the explosion took place in the hanger number 12 of the port of Beirut, which is also responsible for the 80% of import in Lebanon, had sieged3000 tons of ammonium nitrate since 2014 after a court order stopped them from entering Lebanon. The question is why was such an amount of Ammonium nitrate was allowed to be stored at one place without realising the impact it can have in a city like Beirut if anything goes wrong?
Bigger question is if 2 tons of Ammonium nitrate is enough to blow up a building then who was trying to get this much amount of the chemical in the country? We also need to focus on the fact that Israel has long been accusing Hezbollah of keeping its weapon and explosive materials in Beirut, the same organisation which backed PM Diab during his election and has a strong hold on the politics of Lebanon and the Shia community.
In an early tweet, NY times Op-ed Editor Sohrab Amari questioned the nature of this “firework factory” and suggested that it’s a term used for Hezbollah’s rocket storage depot in the middle east. Similar accusation has come from Israel in the past suggesting that there are different point in different parts of Beirut where the Hezbollah has been hiding its weapons and missiles which they get from Iran.
“Fireworks factory” is Mideast-Speak for Hezbollah precision-rocket storage depot.
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) August 4, 2020
Similar claims were made by senior journalist and former chief editor of Lebanon based French news platformL’Orient-Le Jour ,Ziyad Makhoul in his Instagram post said that if Israel would have been involved in this they would have not denied it but they did and whatever happened was probably due to criminal negligence of the Lebanese authorities and their secret’s hidden in Beirut’s port.
“Fireworks factory” is Mideast-Speak for Hezbollah precision-rocket storage depot.
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) August 4, 2020
Lebanon’s crisis is multi-layered, from a failing economy to political unrest and growing violence the young people of Lebanon are unsure about their future. The protests in 2019 which are also known as the October revolution were although triggered by the taxation reforms by then Hariri government but with time unemployment and failing economy also became an issue.
Media reports today suggest that the capital and biggest city of Lebanon, which is also called Switzerland of the middle east, faces up to 20 hours of power cut these days which earlier was just 3 hours. With Covid19 cases rising on a daily basisthe other big crisis which Lebanon faces is of its failing health care system, recently the main Covid19 hospital declared that they are on the verge of getting full and might not be able to take more patients.
With the explosion this situation will get worse as the number of Injured people are too high and some hospitals in the port area have seen damage and are not able to take a lot of patients because of shattered infrastructure.
The timings of the explosion can alsoput a lot of questions in anyone’s mind. The explosion happened just a day after Israel’s warning of taking action against Hezbollah after it thwarted the attempt of planting bombs by them on the border areas which has although led to a question mark around Israel’s denial of it’s involvement in the explosion and according to some media reports Locals are connecting it to the mysterious explosions of similar nature in Syria and Iran but has a little or no proof to it and because the Lebanese authorities have already denied it’s involvement, so has Israel which openly admits, as a part of their defence policy, whenever they attack some other country.
A father doing his absolutely best to protect his son from
Explosion in Beirut . #prayforbeirut🇱🇧 #prayforbeirut #lebnon #lebnon🇱🇧 #lebanon #lebanese #beirut #prayingforbeirut #father #heartwelming pic.twitter.com/FZ2nbQ2GfE— Joe (@themightyjoee) August 4, 2020
The other a major development which was about to take place this week itself was the judgment by the UN tribunal in the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Harari who was killed in an explosion with 21 others in the year 2005,where the 4 suspects are linked to Hezbollah which also makes people question if everything as simple as the administration is making it seem .
While the people of Lebanon face the worst crisis of their life international community has come forward to support Lebanon to help them get over this period of crisis and state of emergency might get declared in Lebanon it would be interesting to see if this massive failure of the authority leads to people of Beirut taking the street once more and will we ever get to know what exactly happened with Beirut or will it also get into the list of dark questions the world could never have answer to.
(Abhigyan Shekhar is an independent writer )
