Protesters block Elia Square in Tripoli. At least 30 protesters were wounded in clashes on Friday with the Lebanese Army in Lebanon’s second largest city, the Lebanese Red Cross reports. (Credit: Souhayb Jawhar)
BEIRUT – At least 30 protesters have been wounded in clashes that erupted on Friday between the Lebanese Army and demonstrators in Tripoli’s Jabal Mohsen area, the Lebanese Red Cross told L’Orient Today’s sister publication, L’Orient Le Jour.
Meanwhile, the army wrote on Twitter that five soldiers were injured by a hand grenade reportedly launched at them by protesters; it said another 10 soldiers had been injured by rocks thrown by demonstrators.
The protesters were taken to local hospitals for treatment, the LRC said.
Protesters also blocked off roads surrounding Tripoli’s Elia and Nour squares.
Rabee Soleiman, a young protester in Tripoli, said the residents of Lebanon’s second largest city — one of the most impoverished areas in the country and the poorest city in the Mediterranean basin — had taken to the streets to condemn increasing prices, electricity cuts and the lack of medicine.
Videos circulating show the army launching volleys of tear gas into crowds of demonstrators, as gunfire sounds in the background.
The protests come a day after Saad Hariri abandoned his efforts to form a government in coordination with President Michel Aoun, plunging Lebanon’s already floundering economy into ever greater uncertainty. Subsequently, The lira plummeted to a new record low earlier today, hitting LL24,000 to the US dollar on the parallel market.
Residents and observers have for weeks been warning that tensions that have been simmering in Jabal Mohsen and nearby Bab al-Tabbaneh may boil over. “It is to be expected that Tripoli” — the poorest city in the Mediterranean basin — “is the first city where clashes break out in light of the crisis because it is the poorest and most marginalized city in the country. The state has been absent from any solution for over more than 50 years,” Samer Hajjar, an economics professor at Balamand University, previously told L’Orient Today’s sister publication, L’Orient-Le Jour.