Three Syrians have been injured and hundreds of Syrian refugee families were left homeless after their camp in northern Lebanon was set on fire on Saturday night following a fight between residents and a local Lebanese family.
The fire destroyed all the tents in the camp the Miniyeh region and caused injuries requiring some people to be taken to hospital, the UN refugee agency said.
"The fire has spread to all the tented shelters", made of plastic sheeting and wood, UNHCR spokesman Khaled Kabbara told AFP.
The camp housed around 75 families, he said.
Video shared on Twitter showed flames spread across a vast area with civil defence vehicles at the scene.
Lebanon's National News Agency reported that the fire followed an "altercation" between a member of a Lebanese family and "Syrian workers".
Other youths from the Lebanese family then "set fire to some of the refugees' tents", NNA said.
Lebanese security forces cordoned off the area in the aftermath of the incident while members of the Civil Defense intervened to control the fire.
A security source told AFP shots were heard, saying the fight in the Bhanine area was sparked when Syrian workers demanded a wage which their employers refused to pay.
However, the same source said later that initial inquiries found the dispute could have been sparked by the harassment of a Syrian woman.
"Some families have fled the area out of fear because there were also sounds of explosions caused by household gas canisters blowing up," Mr Kabbara said.
The fire is the latest in a series of incidents across Lebanon that marked rising tensions between Lebanese residents and Syrian refugees.
Last month, over 250 Syrian refugee families were forced out of Bsharre, a town in north Lebanon, after a Syrian national was accused of killing a Lebanese resident.
Lebanon, which is home to some 1.5 million Syrian refugees, is suffering from its worse financial and economic crisis since the end of the civil in the 70s.
The crisis led to a sharp increase in the proportion of Syrian households living under the extreme poverty line, reaching a staggering 89 per cent in 2020, up from 55 per cent only a year before, UNHCR, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in a recently published 2020 Vulnerability Assessment of Syrian Refugees in Lebanon.
Authorities have called on refugees to return to Syria even though rights groups warn that the war-torn country is not yet safe.
Will the pound fall to parity with the dollar?
The idea of pound parity now seems less far-fetched as the risk grows that Britain may split away from the European Union without a deal.
Rupert Harrison, a fund manager at BlackRock, sees the risk of it falling to trade level with the dollar on a no-deal Brexit. The view echoes Morgan Stanley’s recent forecast that the currency can plunge toward $1 (Dh3.67) on such an outcome. That isn’t the majority view yet – a Bloomberg survey this month estimated the pound will slide to $1.10 should the UK exit the bloc without an agreement.
New Prime Minister Boris Johnson has repeatedly said that Britain will leave the EU on the October 31 deadline with or without an agreement, fuelling concern the nation is headed for a disorderly departure and fanning pessimism toward the pound. Sterling has fallen more than 7 per cent in the past three months, the worst performance among major developed-market currencies.
“The pound is at a much lower level now but I still think a no-deal exit would lead to significant volatility and we could be testing parity on a really bad outcome,” said Mr Harrison, who manages more than $10 billion in assets at BlackRock. “We will see this game of chicken continue through August and that’s likely negative for sterling,” he said about the deadlocked Brexit talks.
The pound fell 0.8 per cent to $1.2033 on Friday, its weakest closing level since the 1980s, after a report on the second quarter showed the UK economy shrank for the first time in six years. The data means it is likely the Bank of England will cut interest rates, according to Mizuho Bank.
The BOE said in November that the currency could fall even below $1 in an analysis on possible worst-case Brexit scenarios. Options-based calculations showed around a 6.4 per cent chance of pound-dollar parity in the next one year, markedly higher than 0.2 per cent in early March when prospects of a no-deal outcome were seemingly off the table.
Bloomberg
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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