Citizens Block Roads with Vehicles in Protest at Fuel Crisis
People got caught in their vehicles that ran out of gas on Friday after gas station owners announced an open-ended strike a day earlier.
Citizens in the northern city of Tripoli blocked roads with their vehicles in protest at the crisis.
In Beirut, taxi drivers and delivery workers staged a protest in the Cola area. Nearby roads were meanwhile blocked in the Corniche al-Mazraa area.
Long queues of citizens were seen swarming some gas stations that remained open although only small quantities were being sold to desperate customers.
"My motorbike ran out of petrol, and I've been waiting outside the petrol station for three hours in vain," Yahya al-Shami said as he queued up for his fill in the capital's Cola neighborhood.
"People are very worried because they all need petrol to work," he told AFP.
"The station is opening for half an hour, then closing again because all the drivers are fighting among each other as they wait."
On local television, a woman complained she had to abandon her car in the middle of the road as she looked for petrol.
"I've been to ten different stations looking for gas and I haven't found any," she said.
Protesters meanwhile blocked several key roads in the Bekaa region.
The Nahr el-Mot vital highway was also briefly blocked by protesters before it was reopened by the army.
Petrol stations have suspended services because of a shortage of dollars needed to pay for imports, a syndicate head said.
A rationing of dollars by banks in protest-hit Lebanon has sparked growing alarm.
The Syndicate of Gas Stations Owners said “some of us received threats from different parties urging us to open our stations.”
Fadi Abou Shakra, an adviser to the Syndicate, told MTV: “We can end the strike if the dollar is provided at the official rate.”
For two decades, the Lebanese pound has been pegged to the greenback at and both currencies used interchangeably in daily life.
Source: Naharnet, Agence France Presse
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