The Lebanese Interior Minister, Raya Hassan’s promises to remove the cement blocks from the whole Lebanese territory are coming true. The campaigns to remove all these blocks are ongoing with the actions being implemented as planned.
Recently, and with the aim to ease the traffic condition in many congested areas in Lebanon, the cement blocks surrounding the Higher Islamic Shiite Council on the old airport road were removed.
These cement blocks were snarling the traffic in the area for years. They were initially installed after a series of threats and security incidents happening in this area, including suicide attacks that targeted Beirut’s southern suburbs in 2013 and 2014.
In this context, Ghobeiri Mayor Maan Khalil said that the shifting of the position of the blocks was ordered in cooperation with the Council following the eradication of security threats.
In recent years, car drivers used to suffer while driving on the old airport road which had been siloed into two lanes while the third was blocked, clogging the road.
The decision of removing these cement blocks comes as a huge campaign that was taken by the newly appointed Minister of Interior in order to ease traffic conditions around Lebanon.
A few months ago, Interior Minister Raya Hassan ordered the removal of the blocks that were installed around her ministry’s building in the Sanayeh’s neighborhood of Beirut since 2014.
Afterward, the security concrete blocks were removed from outside Speaker Nabih Berri’s residence in Beirut’s Ain Tineh area, and a key road was reopened outside. The removal of these blocks has facilitated the flow of traffic towards the Ramlet Bayda area.
In more recent days, several concrete blocks protecting the houses of some politicians and the offices of some political parties have been also removed in several areas of Beirut and Mount Lebanon.
Those concrete blocks have been there for a long while in Lebanon. They were installed as a security measure around several critical government buildings during a high-alert period of threats and assassinations that the country endured at the Syrian regime’s conflict with the Lebanese politicians over a decade ago.
