Will it really survive?
The man races the wind with that question, speeding on his motorcycle to catch up with the engineer who has just finished inspecting a crumbling building in Al-Qobbeh, one of Tripoli’s hotspots for structural collapse.
When he reaches him, he asks, almost pleading: “Tell me the truth. Will the building really not collapse?”
“I swear it won’t,” the engineer replies. “But try to find a life for yourself and your family somewhere else.”
It is a story from the field, recounted to Daraj by engineer Bilal Ali, who participated in a video report the site produced on these buildings. The moment feels like a distilled version of the tragedy, in its pain, its consequences, and its meaning. In Tripoli, residents no longer trust building assessments. Some no longer believe they will survive.
Another man from Al-Qobbeh agrees, after hesitation, to speak on camera. He tries to preserve what remains of his dignity, the same dignity that has kept him from leaving his home like the rest of his neighbors. He suffers from a chronic illness that shows in his swollen legs. He does not complain, but the illness is the silent elephant in the room.
Before filming, his wife speaks. There is no protective roof for the family, especially not for their daughter, whose mental health has deteriorated. She fears both her father’s inability to work or move and the possibility of dying beneath a collapsing ceiling.
Then there is Ahmad, the coffee vendor, who endured a 12-year engagement to the girl next door, saving throughout those years to furnish their future home. When Ahmad speaks, he breaks down in tears. He had stored his belongings in his fiancée’s apartment, in a building that later collapsed in Al-Qobbeh.
Ahmad spent years in displacement and austerity to earn a moment of joy. The bedroom was shattered. The television, the last item he had purchased, was destroyed. So were the teacups and crystal ornaments, luxuries for a poor young man’s household. Yet for years, they had been his reason to endure, because he saw marriage as social ascension by every measure.
Ahmad no longer wakes before noon. He stays up all night, contemplating a life that has collapsed. He sometimes wishes the incident had spared him the burden of ending it himself.
Another building collapses in Al-Tabbaneh. WhatsApp messages begin pouring in from Ayman: “Will you be late publishing the video?” “Don’t you know we’re going to die?” “A building across from us just collapsed. Are you following the news?”
In those moments, you must contain too many emotions at once: your shock, his shock, his reproach, his terror, your shared anger. Daraj’s video was, for Ayman, a lifeline, perhaps the only one. Death mocks him through the cracks in his home, hovering just steps away.
Interventions: Funds, Cards, and Evacuations
Data from the Tripoli Municipality is alarming. Around 600 buildings have required restoration and structural reinforcement since 2006. Of those, 105 need immediate evacuation. Buildings that have already collapsed are not included in this count.
The municipality is responsible for emergency interventions, working alongside the Order of Engineers in Tripoli, volunteer committees, and civil society actors. Together, they formed the “Special Emergency Fund for the Reinforcement of Highly Dangerous Buildings in the City of Tripoli.” The fund receives financial donations under a pledge of transparency, stating that the money will go toward restoring buildings. It has also issued calls for engineers to volunteer in conducting structural surveys.
As for former Prime Minister Najib Mikati, Tripoli’s current MPs, and its former MPs and ministers, their involvement has not gone beyond statements and press releases that reaffirm what appears to be a commitment to indifference.
Paradoxically, for the first time in decades of neglect and marginalization, the Lebanese state has moved at the level of central government.
These steps translated into an urgent humanitarian response. Télé Liban mobilized funds to support affected families. According to Social Affairs Minister Haneen Al-Sayyed, the ministry secured one million dollars to assist families and enrolled them in the “Aman” social safety program. The Ministry of Public Health launched the “Karim” card, providing full hospitalization coverage for families forced to evacuate their homes, who will also benefit from the primary healthcare network.
Daily evacuations continue in Al-Qobbeh, Al-Zahriyeh, and Al-Tabbaneh, alongside notices for urgent structural reinforcement. Housing allowances are provided for one year, paid in four quarterly installments of $1,000 each. In the meantime, some families in Al-Qobbeh have found no shelter and have pitched tents in the street. Others were referred to the Hospitality School in Al-Mina. Then there is the Quality Inn hotel, reportedly under the supervision of the Ministry of Economy and designated for temporary housing. Yet video footage shows it to be closer to a ruin than a refuge.
Unanswered Questions and “Too Many Cooks”
The urgency of intervention should not override caution in how measures are adopted and implemented. One does not need expertise in engineering or crisis management to observe signs of mounting chaos, chaos that risks squandering effort, time, vast financial resources, what little hope remains, and ultimately lives.
Days after a building collapsed in Al-Qobbeh, Daraj observed, during a field visit, a group of young men pulling iron rods from the foundations to sell them, without oversight, without securing the site, and without preserving potential evidence, even though investigations into the causes of the collapse had not concluded. Basic public safety measures were not enforced. Debris rolled onto sidewalks. Exposed iron rods from the rubble obstructed pedestrians.
A question remains suspended: why did it take 72 hours to retrieve Alissar? Could she have been saved had rescue operations been conducted with the same efficiency as in Al-Tabbaneh, where extraction took approximately 12 hours?
Meanwhile, the engineering committee tasked with inspecting buildings is issuing volunteer calls on social media. This raises questions about commitment levels and even about the evaluation of engineers’ qualifications. According to information obtained by Daraj, some of those participating are architects rather than structural engineers.
Public opinion also requires a definitive scientific diagnosis of the land on which these buildings stand. Previous assessments indicate that clay soil lacks proper insulation. In Al-Tabbaneh specifically, water accumulates in building shelters, compounded by the pressure of informal construction and unauthorized additional floors.
Urban disorder and lack of planning are not limited to older neighborhoods. Even in Tripoli’s newer districts, including the high-value “Damm wa Farz” area, dampness spreads across building walls, and wells collect saline water.
So far, many residents of Tripoli have found no explanation for the repeated collapses beyond metaphysical interpretations, “signs of the apocalypse” or “jinn beneath the ground.” The mayor, Dr. Abdel Hamid Karami, has suggested the collapses may be the result of deliberate action. Yet dozens of these buildings were damaged during the clashes between Jabal Mohsen and Bab Al-Tabbaneh between 2011 and 2014, and many were never restored after the Syrian “Deterrence Forces” battles of the 1980s.
A Persistent Absence of Oversight and Accountability
The rescue of Tripoli’s residents and its buildings urgently and non-negotiably requires an independent oversight and accountability body. Such a body should include committees dedicated to building assessments, relief operations, restoration efforts, and monitoring expenditures across all funds, from Télé Liban’s fund to those of the municipality and the Order of Engineers, the Higher Relief Commission’s budget, and the donations allocated to the Ministry of Social Affairs.
Without such a decisive measure, these funds risk becoming instruments of deferred collapse, or even accelerants of it. This does not even begin to address the dangers of financial mismanagement and waste at the expense of people’s lives and losses, a pattern seen repeatedly in similar crises that passed without monitoring or accountability.
The “Gherbal” initiative recalls that the Council for Development and Reconstruction spent $19.2 million in Tripoli between 2004 and 2019 to rehabilitate heritage buildings, hospitals, halls, and exhibition spaces. This package requires scrutiny, particularly regarding the restored heritage buildings. If it included residential properties, as many homes in Tripoli’s markets and old neighborhoods, such as Al-Zahriyeh and Dahr Al-Maghar are classified as heritage structures, were they restored? And how?
In 2024, the Tripoli Municipality received a $500,000 cash grant from the Tripoli Port Authority to restore the municipal building after it was damaged by fire in 2021. The details of how such a large sum was spent on renovating a single building remain unclear, while dozens of structures near the municipality and across the old city remain on the verge of collapse.
The issue also extends to Al-Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen. The Higher Relief Commission allocated funds for housing compensation, restoration, and reconstruction for damages resulting from clashes linked to the Syrian crisis between 2011 and 2014. A decade later, the details of those compensations remain opaque, and buildings continue to collapse.
After the fighting subsided in 2015, local associations implemented facade beautification projects for shops and buildings along Syria Street. Yet the same buildings continue to deteriorate above residents’ heads.
A significant number of these structures in Al-Tabbaneh, Jabal Mohsen, and Dahr Al-Maghar stand adjacent to the Abu Ali River. Their collapses are being addressed in isolation from the earlier “Cultural Heritage” project implemented along the river at the start of the millennium. The World Bank, which allocated between $30 and $40 million to Tripoli, later acknowledged the project’s failure and its deviation from the original vision, which aimed to transform the area into a “second Barcelona.”
Instead, poorer neighborhoods gained a concrete slab covering the river, now scattered with discarded goods, deepening poverty, and sidewalk encroachments enforced by informal extortion. The project fundamentally altered the morphology of the old city and its economic composition, and affected the river’s flow. These engineering, regulatory, and social factors, and their long-term consequences, are absent from the current discourse on building evaluations.
Failures and Delayed Interventions
Amid this devastation, Tripoli has little choice but to join the funds and initiatives launched to save its crumbling buildings. Yet without systematic planning and enforceable oversight conditions, nothing will break the infernal cycle of Tripoli’s tragedies. The city does not lack projects or funding; it lacks governance and disciplined implementation by those who should be responsible.
A national emergency workshop should have been launched in 2015, when ESCWA declared Tripoli the “poorest city on the Mediterranean.” Instead of development programs responding to that alarming signal, Tripoli received only deeper stigmatization and reinforcement of its bleak reputation.
The twin bombing of Al-Taqwa and Al-Salam mosques in August 2013 should have marked a decisive moment of justice, holding those responsible accountable in proportion to the crime that killed 47 people and injured hundreds.
A state of emergency to eliminate the risks of collapsing buildings should have begun in the summer of 2022, when a house collapsed on the young girl Joumana Diko. Months later, Maggie Mahmoud died under the roof of her school, classified as a heritage building in Jabal Mohsen.
This should have happened, now, a year ago, decades ago, and it did not. The collapse of buildings, in all its assault on human dignity, is merely the visible tip of the iceberg. What has truly collapsed are the fragile and underinvested conditions for life itself.
The fractures running through Tripoli’s buildings are a powerful, perhaps the most tangible, embodiment of chronic social and economic fault lines that have long hollowed out the city.
The Collapse of a City, Not Just Its Buildings
There is no ceiling to this city’s collapses. Not in the “boat of death” that has rested on its shore since 2022, its bodies turned into feasts for fish. Not in the 21 rounds of fighting that left 200 people dead and hundreds wounded, with no accountability. Those responsible were instead entrenched as de facto powers in devastated neighborhoods, operating under and for Tripoli’s MPs and political leaders, surviving on extortion and intelligence patronage.
No one was surprised when former Prime Minister Najib Mikati distanced himself from the tragedy of crumbling buildings. The issue is inseparable from the corruption of housing loans that displaced dozens of Tripoli families. As for references to his premiership and global wealth, they have become stale and meaningless.
When once asked about his fortune, Mikati invoked “Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of daybreak.” A pious version of the “blue bead” once raised by the Future Movement. Meanwhile, MP Faisal Karami chose to restore “Birket al-Mallaha” in an old market — the furthest reach of his inherited political legacy. The same could be said of others, old and new MPs and ministers alike.
What they practice resembles what is known as the “shock doctrine,” an unspoken mechanism of governance in which major crises are exploited. Tripoli’s successive crises have been instrumentalized to reshape the city’s behavior. Politicians have pushed residents into a state of mental and emotional exhaustion that strips them of the capacity for oversight and accountability, reducing their highest aspiration to securing a roof over their heads.
In recent years, Tripoli’s stagnation was not enforced through overt political repression, as in other peripheral regions of the Bekaa or the South. In Tripoli, change has been blocked through exhaustion. After a procession of crises and deliberate betrayals, a society has emerged that has adapted to what should be humanly unacceptable.
All of this unfolds within the organic fabric of a city rooted in a century-long continuity of traditions and inherited structures, unlike Beirut, fragmented across contexts and eras. Tripoli, like its buildings, has become burdened by its full social, traditional, and religious weight, shaped by what its “old families” impose or preserve, still inheriting leadership because it is drawn from that heavy cultural inheritance.
It would be mistaken to believe that Tripoli’s decision-makers have made no difference. They have succeeded in two things: entrenching despair, after piles of wasted promises such as “No one will go hungry in Tripoli,” and institutionalizing impoverishment. Poverty becomes a political resource, human bases mobilized for electoral gain, pacified and emptied through the spread of drugs and weapons. Their victims multiply in the holy month of Ramadan in unsettling patterns, received by Tripolitans with hearts heavy with fear, fear of dying beneath the rubble of their homes or a building they pass by, or fear of dying from a bullet.
