Hezbollah supporters and their political allies the Amal Movement, had gathered in central Beirut on Thursday 14 October calling for the removal of the lead judge Tarek Bitar in the Beirut port blast investigation. But the demonstration erupted when snipers opened fire onto protestors, sparking four hours of gun battles and leaving over 30 wounded in east Beirut’s Tayouneh district.
Hezbollah, the Shia Muslim group and most powerful political party, accused its rivals, the Lebanese Forces (LF), a right-wing Maronite Christian party, of orchestrating the sniper ambush. In response, hundreds of predominately Shia men dressed in black and khaki, fired guns and rocket propelled grenades, in the worst bout of clashes between purported Christian and Muslim militias in over a decade.
Residents in the area were forced to flee, while children in nearby schools cowered under desks, recreating the nightmarish scenes of the 25-year-civil war.
Beirut’s characteristically traffic-clogged roads emptied as the Lebanese Army ordered citizens off the streets, and sirens echoed through the city as ambulances rushed to treat the wounded.
Two of the seven victims were not partaking in the demonstrations, including one mother of five, who was shot inside her apartment by a passing bullet.
The alarming security incident comes as Lebanon has been sinking under an acute two-year economic crisis that has pushed the fragile nation of six million to the brink of collapse amid shortages of essential goods, hyperinflation, and widespread unemployment.
The LF, the Christians’ principal wartime militia, have rejected Hezbollah and Amal’s accusations. “Accusing the Lebanese Forces is refused, and it aims to deviate attention from Hezbollah’s invasion of this region,” the group said in a statement. The Lebanese Army said it made nineteen arrests in relation to the sniper fire, though it remains unclear as to who was responsible for igniting the attacks.
President Michel Aoun condemned the fighting, saying weapons should not return as “a language of communication between the Lebanese parties”.
The head of Lebanon’s Maronite Catholic Church joined Aoun in denouncing the attack. Speaking during Sunday Mass, Patriarch Bechara Boutros al Rai urged for peaceful religious co-existence in Lebanon: “Young Christians are invited to know the truth of Islam, its faith and its values, and Muslim youth are invited to know the truth, faith and values of Christianity. This is the essence of shared living that forms the advantage and message of Lebanon, and pluralism in unity culturally and religiously.”
Hezbollah, deemed a terrorist organisation by the UK and US, holds both the strongest parliamentary bloc and the largest non-state militia force in the country. Lebanon is the only Arab nation with a Christian head of state, as denoted by the country’s power sharing system that dictates the president must be Maronite Catholic, the prime minister Sunni Muslim and the parliament speaker Shia Muslim.
The Hezbollah-Amal Shiite duo accuse Bitar of politicising the probe into the port explosion of August 2020, which killed 218 people and decimated swathes of the capital, including the historic Christian quarters in east Beirut. Bitar called for questioning two sitting Amal MPs, and subsequently issued an arrest warrant after the pair failed to show up. Other senior political and security figures, including former prime minister Hassan Diab, are wanted for interrogation.
But fourteen months on from the country’s worst peacetime disaster, the investigation is yet to yield answers, leaving many Lebanese fearing that little justice will be served alongside an entrenched culture of impunity among the political and religious establishment.
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