Lebanon's central bank is now suing the very institutions it once enriched—and its top lawyer says settlements are off the table until someone is convicted. For depositors who've waited six years, it's the most direct statement they've ever heard from the institution at the heart of the collapse.

• Banque du Liban's lead legal counsel Badih Moukarzel told Daraj that banks must pay, and "we are talking about billions of dollars"—with no silent financial settlements permitted before indictment and conviction.
• The central bank's second lawsuit targets BankMed, its former director Mohammed Hariri, and Alaa Khawaja, whose acquisition of shares in the bank's holding company was allegedly financed through funds secretly routed from Banque du Liban.
• French investigating judges have already indicted HSBC Private Bank Suisse, ordering it to deposit a bail of 80 million euros as part of a money laundering and embezzlement probe tied to former governor Riad Salameh's "Forry Associates" file.
• Lawyer Karim Daher warns the process remains fragmented, noting it was foreign judiciaries—in France, Luxembourg, and Switzerland—not Lebanese courts, that forced these files open in the first place.

What to watch: Whether Lebanon's judiciary can carry these cases to conviction—or whether the pattern of the 2003 Bank Al-Madina scandal, where accountability quietly evaporated, repeats itself.

Joint parliamentary committees have now approved abolition of the death penalty—clearing the final procedural hurdle before Lebanon's 128 MPs vote in a plenary session. The practical stakes go beyond human rights: it could finally unlock extradition deals that countries with capital punishment bans have long refused Lebanon.

• The joint committees approved the bill on Thurs⁠day; the Parliament Bureau is expected to meet Mon⁠day to schedule the full plenary vote, according to L'Orient To⁠day.
• Under the proposed law, the death penalty across 41 legal provisions—spanning the Penal Code, Military Justice Code, and special laws—would be replaced with "aggravated life imprisonment" under strict detention conditions.
• A judicial source told Al Modon that the change would eliminate a key legal obstacle: countries like Bulgaria refused to extradite the owner of the Beirut Port explosion's nitrate ship, Igor Grechushkin, specifically because Lebanese law allowed the death penalty.
• No execution has been carried out in Lebanon since Jan⁠uary 2004; courts have since commuted death sentences to life imprisonment under an EU-backed moratorium.

Why it matters: Moving Lebanon from a country that freezes the death penalty to one that bans it by law has concrete judicial consequences—including potentially reopening extradition cases that have been stalled for years.

Thurs⁠day's Cabinet session delivered two concrete decisions for a country still healing: a green light for international flights at a long-dormant northern airport, and emergency housing authorization for hundreds of thousands of people still unable to go home in the south.

• The Cabinet approved licenses for regular international flights at Rene Moawad Airport in Qlayaat (Akkar); rehabilitation began Jun⁠e 8 and the first flight is expected around mid-Sep⁠tember, according to Public Works Minister Fayez Rasamny.
• Ministers authorized the Higher Relief Committee to purchase prefabricated housing units through direct contracting for citizens whose homes were destroyed by Israeli attacks, as hundreds of thousands in south Lebanon remain displaced.
• Social Development Minister Haneen Sayed had announced ten days earlier that 400,000 displaced people—roughly 40% of the more than one million displaced since Mar⁠ch 2—had returned to their areas of origin.
• The Cabinet also approved three draft agreements with Morocco on judicial cooperation in criminal matters and the extradition of wanted persons.

Zooming out: Qlayaat's activation as an international airport—if it holds to its Sep⁠tember timeline—would give northern Lebanon its first direct air link in decades, reducing the country's near-total dependence on Beirut's single runway.

Kurdish militias were armed, trained, and days away from crossing into Iran earlier this⁠ year when the US abruptly pulled the plug—reportedly after Turkey's President Erdogan applied direct pressure on Washington to kill the operation.

• According to Israeli i24News, Kurdish fighters had received weapons a week before the planned attack, with preparations including meetings with militia groups and military training organized by US intelligence agencies over several months.
• Senior Israeli officials accused US Vice President JD Vance of leaking details of the planned operation to Ankara, which then moved immediately to stop it—a charge that, if accurate, points to a significant rift inside the US-Israel alliance.
• Iran killed five members of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan last⁠ week near Piranshahr in West Azerbaijan province, as a lower-level conflict between Tehran and Kurdish armed groups continues regardless.
• Israel's security establishment has separately warned its government about Turkey's growing influence across Syria, Lebanon, and other parts of the Middle East, with one minister calling a Turkey-Israel military confrontation "entirely possible."

The bigger picture: The episode illustrates how competing agendas among nominal allies—Washington, Ankara, and Tel Aviv—are shaping the post-Iran-war regional order in ways that are only now coming to light.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has issued a decree calling legislative elections for Nov⁠ember 28, which would be the first Palestinian parliamentary vote in two decades if they go ahead.

• Abbas, 90, issued the decree calling on Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip to elect members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, according to the PA's official Wafa news agency.
• The last legislative vote, held in 2006, saw Hamas defeat Abbas's Fatah party, triggering a power split that effectively suspended both the legislature and elections ever since—meaning much of the Palestinian population has never voted.
• The median age in the Palestinian Territories is about 20, and holding legitimate elections has become an explicit demand from the international community that financially supports the Palestinian Authority.
• It remains unclear how elections could be conducted in Gaza, where the vast majority of buildings and infrastructure were destroyed, and where the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza is due to take over power from Hamas.

What to watch: Whether elections can actually be organized in Gaza—given the scale of destruction and the unresolved question of who holds authority on the ground—will determine whether Nov⁠ember 28 holds as a real date or becomes another postponed milestone.

Beijing has passed two new regulations since Mar⁠ch expanding its ability to penalize foreign companies that comply with Western sanctions, putting multinationals in an increasingly impossible position between US and EU rules on one side and Chinese law on the other.

• Under State Council Decree No. 835, companies that implement measures with "improper extraterritorial jurisdiction" can face fines, visa cancellations, asset freezes, and investment restrictions inside China.
• A third law, still in draft, would allow Chinese prosecutors to bring cases against foreign organizations and individuals whose acts "harm China's national interests," according to state media.
• In May⁠, Beijing for the first time invoked its 2021 blocking law to bar Chinese citizens and companies from complying with US sanctions on Chinese oil refineries for buying Iranian oil.

Zooming out: Beijing-based advisory firm Trivium China has warned that foreign companies will find themselves "increasingly caught between an American rock and a Chinese hard place" as the regulatory gap between the two systems widens.