LEBANON’S Information Minister resigned today as huge protests continued to rock the capital Beirut.

Manal Abdel-Samad said she regretted failing to fulfil the aspirations of the Lebanese people and that change remained “elusive” with the current political set-up.

Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at crowds who pelted them with stones, while demonstrators set up gallows and nooses in central Beirut and held mock hanging sessions of top officials.

Protesters invaded Economy and Energy Ministry offices, ransacking them and emerging with documents they said would detail the scale of government corruption. Some briefly occupied the Foreign Ministry.

The explosion of a fertiliser stockpile in a Beirut port warehouse last week killed at least 160 people, injured almost 6,000 and created a shock wave and fire that destroyed thousands of buildings.

Documents that surfaced after the blast showed that officials had been repeatedly warned for years that the presence of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate at the port posed a grave danger, but no-one acted to remove it. Officials have been blaming one another, and 19 people have been detained.

The catastrophe caused an upsurge in protests that have been swelling for over a year against a confessional political system that allocates positions to representatives of different religious communities, which protesters say has led to rampant corruption and precludes democratic change.

The Lebanese Communist Party said the blast was a “crime against the nation” for which “the entire political system” was responsible.

It said that “the blatant inability to secure the simplest public services to confront coronavirus [was] also part of the catastrophe [that] happened to culminate in the horrific Beirut port explosion.”

On Saturday Prime Minister Hassan Diab said the only solution to the crisis was early elections. 

Today French President Emmanuel Macron, the first foreign leader to visit after the explosion, chaired an international donors’ summit to drum up relief funds. His declaration that “France will never let Lebanon go,” combined with an online petition calling for France to restore the “mandate” by which it ruled Lebanon from 1920-46, has led to accusations that he is seeking to exploit the crisis for political influence. 

While a Hezbollah-aligned minister toured Iranian and Russian-built field hospitals for the wounded, the communists said they “reject all attempts to take advantage of this crime to adjust the internal balance of power or to bring foreign powers to intervene in the country’s domestic affairs.”