Refugee pressure: the labour minister asks for help; Hollande pledges aid.
In April 2016 Labour Minister Sejaan Azzi, citing 25 per cent unemployment and 1.5 million Syrians, asked the US ambassador to take the refugee burden off Lebanon. Visiting Beirut that month, François Hollande announced 50 million euros a year in refugee aid for 2016-2018.
Beirut municipal elections: Hariri's list beats the civil-society list Beirut Madinati.
Saad Hariri's list won Beirut's council over Beirut Madinati ('Beirut, my city'), a civil-society slate that proposed deliberative urban planning and fielded engineers, architects, artists and researchers; Reder links it to the 2015 'You Stink' protests. Some 80 per cent of voters abstained.
Art and memory
artwork A 111101 project presents the 2016 Beirut municipal vote interactively, from the results and the electoral rolls (/Projects/Municipalities/results-beirut.php and voters-beirut.php).
Beit Beirut, the memory museum in the Barakat building, is inaugurated but stays closed.
The municipality inaugurated Beit Beirut, the old snipers' building on the demarcation line, but kept it shut; its 2008-2016 restoration saw repeated quarrels among the municipality, architect and scientific committee. Paris's mayor visited in September.
Art and memory
memorial Beit Beirut, the old Barakat building on the demarcation line, was the municipality's planned museum of the city's memory. Reder finds that in 2016-2019 artists and NGOs, not the municipality, kept it alive.
President Aoun tells the UN refugee chief that Syrians cannot stay in Lebanon for good.
Aoun told UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi the refugees could not stay permanently and the world must help them home, but Lebanon would force no one back while Syria was unsafe.
The army launches operation 'Fajr al-Jurud' against the Islamic State on the eastern border.
On President Aoun's orders the army moved against Islamic State and al-Nusra fighters holding the arid hills of Ras Baalbek and al-Qaa, while Hezbollah attacked al-Nusra from the Syrian side, a rare tacit cooperation. The jihadists held out for several days before surrendering, and a truce let the survivors and their families go to eastern Syria.
Saad Hariri announces his resignation from Riyadh.
President Aoun refused the resignation Saad al-Hariri announced live from Riyadh; in the view of some Lebanese officials he was acting under Saudi duress and being held there against his will.
Postponed for five years, the vote drew low turnout amid mistrust. Activists from the waste protests ran on independent lists; one unaffiliated candidate won a seat.
Parliament adopts Law 105 on the missing and forcibly disappeared.
Wadad Halwani, head of the committee of families of the kidnapped and disappeared, whose husband was taken in 1982, broke down as deputies applauded. The law created a commission to trace detainees believed alive in Syria, identify remains in mass graves and investigate wartime forced disappearances.
Art and memory
testimony Wadad Halwani founded the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared after her husband was abducted in 1982. He is still missing; the vote renewed her hope.
film De Clerck and Malsagne cite Daniele Rugo's documentary The Soil and the Sea (2023), co-produced with Carmen Hassoun Abou Jaoudé, among war-memory works inspired by the missing.
Deadly incident at Qabr Chmoun during a visit by Gebran Bassil.
Two people died at Qabr Chmoun when Walid Jumblatt's supporters, contesting a visit by Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, attacked a Druze minister close to Talal Arslan. Some likened it to the 1975 Ain al-Rummaneh bus; many Christians stayed away from their Mountain villages that summer.
Financial collapse: the pound loses 98 per cent of its value.
GDP fell from 52 to 21.8 billion dollars between 2019 and 2021, and the dollar rose from 1,500 to 89,600 pounds. Some call the elite's large-scale diversion of bank savings the 'heist of the century'. By 2024 about 44 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line.
A tax on WhatsApp calls sets off the 17 October uprising.
Protest began with angry crowds on the Ring bridge, the old East-West demarcation line, and quickly spread nationwide. Cutting across communities and known as hirak, intifada or thawra, the movement wanted a corrupt political class replaced and institutions rebuilt. Parties and financial interests soon hijacked it; de Clerck and Malsagne judge that it ended up deepening divisions.
Protesters rejected the cabinet over Hezbollah's role in forming it and its ties to the old political class; six women among twenty ministers changed little.
More than 240 people were killed and thousands injured when a massive explosion destroyed Beirut's port and devastated much of the city, already reeling from financial collapse and Covid-19.
The Special Tribunal finds an alleged Hezbollah member guilty of Hariri's murder and sentences him in absentia.
After ten contested years, the tribunal convicted one alleged Hezbollah member in absentia. Hezbollah, which never cooperated, called the court politicised and a Western tool; de Clerck and Malsagne say Lebanese taxpayers paid 800 million dollars for it.
Hezbollah opens a 'support front' with Gaza on the southern border.
A day after Hamas attacked Israel, Hezbollah opened a 'support front' under the 'unity of the battlefields' doctrine, to be suspended if Gaza won a ceasefire. Tacit rules of engagement held for eleven months, but southern villagers still had to flee.
Bombing damages Lebanon's heritage: Baalbek, Tyre, Nabatieh.
Israeli strikes razed whole villages in the South and Bekaa and damaged or destroyed heritage sites. Among those de Clerck and Malsagne describe as UNESCO-listed are Baalbek's Roman temple, Tyre's Roman remains and hippodrome, the temple of Douris, Tebnine's crusader fort and the Chamaa shrine; other landmarks hit include the Ottoman Manshiyya house in Baalbek, Nabatieh's old souk and the Palmyra Hotel.
Art and memory
place De Clerck and Malsagne list sites of Lebanon's long past damaged or destroyed in 2024, among them Baalbek's Roman temple and Palmyra Hotel, Tyre's hippodrome, Tebnine fort and Nabatieh's old souk.
Former central bank governor Riad Salameh is arrested.
The former central bank governor, accused of a key role in the financial crisis, was arrested; the arrest divided defenders acting from communal loyalty and citizens seeking their rights.
Hezbollah's pagers and walkie-talkies explode across Lebanon (17-18 September).
Pagers and walkie-talkies carried by Hezbollah members were detonated simultaneously by remote control, killing and wounding many, numerous civilians among them. Other Lebanese went blind too, because an international embargo on corneal grafts followed and blocked urgent transplants.
Israel launches operation 'Northern Arrows': 558 killed in one day.
Israel's 'Northern Arrows' began with strikes on the South, the Bekaa and Beirut's southern suburb; 558 died on 23 September, Lebanon's deadliest day in recent history.
Hassan Nasrallah is killed in massive Israeli strikes on the southern suburb.
Bunker-buster raids on Beirut's southern suburb killed Hassan Nasrallah and much of Hezbollah's command. De Clerck and Malsagne say Netanyahu gave the order in New York while France's Emmanuel Macron was pressing for a truce.
Iran fires some 200 missiles at Israel after Nasrallah's killing.
Iran's strike answered the killings of Hassan Nasrallah and of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the latter in Tehran on 31 July. Israel bombed Iran on 26 October, leaving Lebanon caught between the two.
