🌳 Justice, almost

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Judge Bitar Wraps Beirut Port Investigation—Nearly Six Years Later

The backstory: The Aug. 4, 2020 explosion at Beirut port—one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history—killed more than 235 people and wounded 6,500. Investigative judge Tarek Bitar has spent years fighting political interference, legal challenges, and obstruction from the very officials his probe implicates.

• Judge Bitar formally concluded his investigation Monday and submitted the full case file to Court of Cassation prosecutor Jamal Hajjar for review, according to L'Orient Today and the state news agency.
• About 70 people are implicated in the case, spanning political, security, and administrative figures—Hajjar will issue his opinion on suspects questioned since early 2025 for whom no decisions have yet been made.
• There's a timing problem: Hajjar is set to retire in April, meaning the file—thousands of pages—will likely be split among multiple prosecutors, potentially slowing the path to an indictment.
• Bitar's probe survived repeated obstruction, including a 2023 accusation of "usurping authority" by then-prosecutor Ghassan Oueidat—who was himself named in the investigation—before being fully cleared.

What to watch: Whether Hajjar's imminent retirement stalls momentum toward a formal indictment, and whether Lebanon's political class—many of whom are implicated—will find new ways to delay accountability before a verdict is ever reached.

Israel Admits Photoshopping Image of Slain Lebanese Journalist

• The Israeli military admitted to fabricating a photo used to justify its killing of Al-Manar correspondent Ali Shuaib, who died in a strike near Jezzine on Saturday alongside two other journalists, Al-Mayadeen's Fatima Ftouni and her brother Mohammad.
• After claiming Shuaib was a Hezbollah operative, the Israeli army doctored an image showing him in military uniform—when asked by Fox News for the source, a spokesperson said "unfortunately, there isn't really a picture of it, it was photoshopped."
• The Committee to Protect Journalists noted that 11 members of the press have been killed in Lebanon since 2023, and that Israel was responsible for two-thirds of a record-breaking 129 media worker deaths globally in 2025.

Why it matters: An army admitting on record that it fabricated evidence to justify killing journalists is not a footnote—it's a direct challenge to the international legal protections that press freedom organizations say are already being systematically dismantled.

FAO Warns Lebanon Faces Worsening Food Shock as Regional War Drives Up Costs

• The FAO's chief economist told Al Modon that Lebanon already has 874,000 people—roughly 17% of those assessed—facing crisis-level or emergency food insecurity, and that number could rise to 961,000 between April and July 2026 if current conditions persist.
• Regional conflict disruptions sent Brent crude temporarily to $115–$120 per barrel, drove European natural gas prices up 50–75%, and pushed Middle East granular urea prices up 19% past $590 per ton in the first week of March alone.
• The FAO projects global fertilizer prices could rise 15–20% in the first half of 2026, compounding Lebanon's structural vulnerability as a heavily import-dependent economy already battered by years of crisis.

The bigger picture: Lebanon's food crisis isn't primarily about shelves running empty—it's about purchasing power collapsing under the weight of rising import costs, a depreciating currency, and a regional conflict disrupting the trade routes the country depends on to eat.

QUICK HITS

• Ambassador won't budge: Iran defied Lebanon's expulsion order Monday, with its ambassador still sitting in Beirut past the Sunday deadline—prompting Israel's foreign minister to quip he was "drinking his coffee and making a mockery" of the host country. Lebanon hasn't said what happens next.
• Mossad suspect, Ukrainian passport: Lebanese authorities formally requested the Ukrainian embassy hand over a Palestinian-Syrian national with Ukrainian citizenship, accused of links to an Israeli Mossad cell plotting assassinations and bombings in Beirut's southern suburbs after he escaped Hezbollah detention during an Israeli airstrike on March 6.
• 40,580 liras per kilowatt: The Ministry of Energy published March's private generator tariff, setting the rate at 40,580 LL per kilowatt-hour for urban subscribers—calculated on a diesel canister price of 1,982,753 LL and a parallel-market dollar rate of 89,700 LL. Your generator guy is not allowed to add VAT on top.
• Potatoes: now a national issue: The Agriculture Ministry announced a market stabilization plan capping potato prices at 400,000 LL per 10 kilograms at participating outlets, including limited imports from Egypt, until Akkar's local harvest hits shelves in mid-April.
• Michigan attack, Hezbollah link: The FBI assessed that Ayman Ghazali, a Lebanese-born naturalized US citizen, was "inspired" by Hezbollah ideology when he drove a truck into Michigan's largest synagogue on March 12—days after losing two brothers and two relatives in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. No one inside was injured.

INTERNATIONAL

Someone Made a Fortune Minutes Before Trump Paused Iran Strikes. Regulators Aren't Looking.

• On March 23, at 6:49 A.M. Eastern time, roughly 6,000 oil-trading contracts worth more than half a billion dollars changed hands—someone was selling oil futures and buying stock futures, according to the Financial Times, just before Trump posted that the US and Iran were in talks.
• When Trump's announcement dropped shortly after 7 A.M., crude prices plunged more than 10% and stock futures jumped 2.5%—whoever placed those trades made a significant profit in a very short window.
• The pre-announcement volume was roughly nine times the average for that time of day, according to Bloomberg data, and veteran traders said the scale required tens of millions of dollars in margin reserves.
• The C.F.T.C., the regulator with primary authority over futures markets, did not respond to questions about whether an investigation has been launched, according to The New Yorker.

What to watch: Whether the C.F.T.C. or SEC—both led by Trump-aligned appointees and already seeing dramatically reduced enforcement caseloads—will pursue the trades at all, or whether this joins a growing list of unexamined financial anomalies around presidential announcements.

Spain Closes Airspace to US War Planes, Citing the Ghost of Iraq

• Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez closed Spain's airspace to US planes involved in attacks on Iran and ruled out the use of Spanish military bases, becoming one of the most vocal European leaders against the US-Israeli war on Iran.
• Sanchez explicitly invoked the 2003 Iraq War, saying "the nightmare of Iraq will repeat itself, but this time on a much larger scale"—a reference that resonates deeply in Spain, where polling shows more than two-thirds of the public oppose the military intervention.
• Spain depends on imports for roughly 70% of its energy, and petrol prices have already climbed about 10% since the conflict began, with tourism experts warning of cancelled flights and a potential summer slump.

Zooming out: Spain's posture—once an outlier in Europe—is gaining traction across the continent, with Italy's defense minister and Britain's prime minister both signaling reluctance to deepen involvement, suggesting the US-Israeli coalition may face growing friction with its traditional European partners.

Iran's New Supreme Leader Frames the War as a Tool to Consolidate Power at Home

• In his Nowruz message on March 20, Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei titled the new year "Resilient Economy Amidst National Unity and National Security"—a formulation analysts say is designed to position the wartime economy as a means of maintaining internal stability rather than addressing economic imbalances.
• Khamenei described the current conflict as Iran's "third war" of the past year—military, security, and economic—framing the full scope of external pressure as a unified threat requiring societal discipline and loyalty to the state.
• Pakistan, in coordination with Turkey and Egypt, has been conveying messages between Washington and Tehran in an effort to contain escalation and prepare a political solution, though no clear end to military confrontations is in sight.

The bigger picture: By broadening the definition of "threat" to encompass internal dissent alongside external attack, Iran's leadership is using wartime rhetoric to preemptively suppress post-war accountability—a pattern analysts warn could make the political reckoning far more volatile once the fighting stops.

GHER HEK

• Ye heard our music: Kanye West sampled Fairuz's 1963 classic "Fayek Alaya" on his new album Bully, blending her vocals with his experimental soundscape in a track called "All the Love"—making her arguably the most sampled Arab artist ever, with Drake, Macklemore, and Madonna also on that list.
• Lebanese wine, women first: Rita El Khoury's Lebanon's Women in Wine collective is reshaping the country's 6,000-year-old winemaking tradition—mentoring female producers, enabling collective exports, and ensuring that roughly 50–60% of Lebanese wine reaching international markets carries the voices of the women who actually make it.
• Beirut prof goes global: Professor Fouad Zmokhol, dean of the business school at Saint Joseph University in Beirut, was elected vice president of the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie at its board meeting in Dakar, Senegal—a network spanning more than 1,000 higher education institutions across 120 countries.
• Road builder to champion: FC Thun, promoted to the Swiss Super League last May and predicted to be relegated immediately, are now 15 points clear at the top of the table with seven games left—and their star player Ethan Meichtry went from working as a road builder to all-but-certain Swiss champion in three years.

Yalla, go make it a good one.