June 7, 2026
Author
Tripoli’s recurring building collapses aren’t natural disasters or bad luck — they’re the engineered result of decades of paralyzed policy and deferred accountability. Beginning with the February 2026 Bab al-Tabbaneh collapse that killed 15 residents, this investigation dismantles the structural triad and bureaucratic failures that keep the city in danger.
Prepared by Lawyer Khaled Walid Al Sabbagh
Specialist in Strategic Studies and Public Policy
07 June 2026
The repeated collapses of residential buildings in the city of Tripoli are neither sudden natural disasters nor an inescapable fate. They are the inevitable, carefully engineered outcome of paralyzed public policies and a structural triad that has persisted for decades. This was confirmed by the latest tragedy in February 2026, when a building in the Bab al-Tabbaneh area collapsed, killing 15 residents and once again bringing to the forefront a file burdened by fragmented official promises and a wall of bureaucratic toxicity that has prevented the city from breathing. In contrast, the people of Tripoli are sinking into a state of acquired helplessness, where chronic frustration has turned into passive acceptance of danger. Dismantling this condition requires confronting the strategic facts, understanding the mechanisms of joint obstruction between the central authority and local administration, and transforming shocking figures and testimonies into legal and rights-based tools capable of imposing accountability and reclaiming civic initiative.
First: The Interlocking Structural Dimensions of the Crisis — The Paralyzed Triad
The collapse of any concrete ceiling in Tripoli cannot be separated from the concrete and legislative collapse of the Lebanese state itself. The crisis is fed by three interlocking drivers that reproduce danger on a daily basis.
The Trap of Old Rent Laws and Systematic Deterioration
• The historical rent-control framework governing leases signed before July 1992 imposed near-total stagnation on landlords’ revenues. This stagnation eliminated both the economic incentive and the financial capacity to carry out structural maintenance on buildings.
• The reform path introduced by the 2014 rent law was disrupted by constitutional appeals and administrative delays.
• The greatest bottleneck lies in the state’s inability, or unwillingness, to finance the tenant support fund. This paralysis left landlords receiving worthless sums and tenants unable to contribute, pushing both parties to postpone repairing foundations for fear of eviction or because they could not cover the cost.
The Illusion of the Minimum Wage and the Trap of Unsafe Housing
• For years, the minimum wage remained fixed at 675,000 Lebanese pounds. With hyperinflation after 2019, households’ real incomes were crushed.
• Even after late nominal increases raised the minimum wage to 9 million pounds in 2023, then 18 million in 2024, and 28 million in 2025, these figures remained little more than ink on paper in the face of runaway inflation.
• The direct result is that Tripoli’s families have been pushed into the trap of forced unsafe housing. Residents are now largely unable to afford relocating to alternative housing or contributing to the reinforcement of their deteriorating roofs.
The Shock of Dollarized Costs and Clientelist Corruption in Permits
• The currency collapse led to the full dollarization of construction materials, including steel, cement, and engineers’ fees, alongside a severe erosion of the state’s technical and regulatory capacity.
• Even more dangerous is the electoral and clientelist legacy. Across successive election seasons in Tripoli, political collusion allowed residents to add illegal floors on top of already fragile buildings in order to reward political loyalists. Buildings designed to bear two or three floors were thus transformed into six-story structures, placing their foundations under lethal structural stress.
Second: The Strangulation of Municipal Finance and the Bureaucracy of the Deep State
The municipality bears direct responsibility for oversight, but a deeper reading reveals a mechanism of financial and administrative strangulation imposed by the central authority that prevents any sustainable solution.
In an interview on the Haki Taghyir podcast, Engineer Mostafa Fakher El Dine, head of the Engineering Committee at Tripoli Municipality, stated clearly:
Quoted statement
“We now receive good money at the municipality, but we cannot spend all of it. You have to go back to administrative centralization. Any project idea has to make the long round through the ministries and the governorate; by the time it comes back, summer has become winter and winter has become summer.”
This crisis becomes visible in financing and oversight channels through the following points:
• Independent Municipal Fund Revenues: The Illusion of Dead Numbers: Municipalities structurally depend on transfers from the central state. Official decrees show that Tripoli was allocated large nominal sums, around 28.36 billion Lebanese pounds for 2019 and 26.26 billion for 2020. But these funds were disbursed only after delays stretching over years, reaching the municipal fund after having lost more than 95% of their effective purchasing value due to exchange-rate collapse.
• The Crisis of Outdated Civil Registry Records: Municipal Fund allocations are distributed based on old civil-status records rather than Tripoli’s actual population burden, depriving the city of resources proportionate to the scale of its real crisis.
• The Systematic Blocking of Decentralization: Tripoli possesses all the economic components needed for self-financing — a port, René Moawad Airport, the Rashid Karami International Fair, and an inactive railway sector. Yet the central authority drains these revenues and blocks administrative and financial decentralization in order to keep the city dependent and subjected to the drip-feeding of assistance.
Third: The Accountability Matrix — Breaking Down Municipal Promises with Numbers
To enable investigative and civil advocacy teams to monitor the performance of the current municipal council and the engineering committee, this article presents a matrix that cross-references official indicators with the statements and commitments of Engineer Mostafa Fakher El Dine. The figures below expose the vast gap between broad assessments and actual operational intervention.
Matrix of Discrepancies and the Evolution of the Number of Buildings Threatened with Collapse
• 2022 general survey documented by Tripoli Municipality and Amnesty International: 236 buildings, including 139 modern concrete buildings and 97 endangered heritage buildings.
• August 2023 interview with the President of the Tripoli Municipal Council: 800–1,000 buildings, in a broader classification that included cracks resulting from the February 2023 earthquakes.
• August 2023 risk determination by Tripoli Municipality and Amnesty: 20–25 buildings, representing the highest-risk category — occupied buildings on the verge of immediate collapse.
• September 2023 press statement to L’Orient Today by a municipal council member: approximately 700 buildings, an oral, approximate, non-final estimate limited to the narrow urban core.
• February 2026 alarm bell, from Engineer Mostafa Fakher El Dine on Haki Taghyir: 800 surveyed buildings; the more dangerous reality is that he acknowledged 700 buildings in need of reinforcement and 36 occupied buildings requiring immediate demolition.
• February 2026 government plan, Cabinet decision, and Reuters: 114 buildings officially targeted for immediate evacuation within one month as a short-term top priority.
• February 2026 implementation update, government statement reported by An-Nahar: 16 buildings actually evacuated in the first phase, affecting 161 families.
The Financial Gap and the “Zero Dollars” Statement
The head of the engineering committee made a striking statement:
“Everyone expects money to come to the municipality to support the buildings. I have 0 dollars for reinforcement.”
This statement raises major questions about the destination of donations or joint funds and establishes a legal basis for holding the central state accountable for refusing to finance reinforcement efforts.
Failures in Administrative Projects and Infrastructure
• The loss of the $1.1 million traffic-light project: A project was designed and equipped to operate 11 main traffic lights in Tripoli. Because the contractor insisted on payment by bank cheque in order to reserve goods from Italy, the funds accumulated in the banks and lost their value when the financial crisis began, causing the entire project to collapse.
• Road paving and deadly bureaucracy: Since November 2023, the municipality had obtained approvals to pave and cover 70% to 80% of the city’s streets in cooperation with the Ministry of Public Works and MPs’ allocations. Implementation was postponed until April because of winter, and with the outbreak of hostilities and changes in ministry budgets, the appropriations evaporated, leaving streets to turn into widening potholes.
• The shortage of municipal police: Geographically and demographically, Tripoli needs 600 municipal police officers to control violations and clear sidewalks. The municipality had been operating with only 55 officers. Even after being recently reinforced with 100 new officers, leaving it with around 90 active officers, the force still remains incapable of enforcing decisions to remove encroachments by cafés and stalls along the Abu Ali River.
Fourth: From Helplessness to Rights-Based Citizenship — A Roadmap for Enforcing Reform
To dismantle the narrative of helplessness and transform Tripoli from a city waiting for catastrophe into a society that claims its structural and living rights, the article calls for adopting and implementing a roadmap based on a Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA).
Immediate Declaration of a Unified Registry of Threatened Buildings
• The geographic and rights-based demand: cooperation with the engineering committee and the municipal council to publish a public, GIS-based digital platform updated weekly.
• Platform content: the registry should include the date of the engineering inspection, the degree of risk (A, B, C), the committee’s decision (repair, reinforcement, demolition), and the identity of the responsible engineering bodies in order to prevent arbitrariness and political favoritism in setting priorities.
A Conditional Compensatory Evacuation Protocol (Remedy with Evacuation)
• Reject forced displacement: no family should be evacuated through dry warnings without an immediate alternative being secured.
• Housing allowance guarantee: activate a transparent and sustainable mechanism to pay the monthly housing allowance of $360 provided through the Higher Relief Commission. This amount should be reviewed to match current housing-market prices and war-driven displacement flows, so that structural safety does not become a cause of systematic homelessness.
A National Fund for Restoration and Reinforcement Outside Central Control
• Direct financing: legislative pressure through Tripoli’s MPs to create a dedicated fund for restoring northern buildings.
• Funding mechanism: it should be financed directly from the revenues of Tripoli’s vital facilities — the port and the fairgrounds — without passing through the decayed channels of the Independent Municipal Fund. It should be administered by a board of trustees including the Order of Engineers in the North, international donor bodies such as UNDP and WFP, and private companies, in order to guarantee full transparency and prevent clientelist waste.
Mandatory Engineering Supervision and Criminalization of Cosmetic Cover-Ups
• Ban random contracting: criminalize superficial maintenance operations, such as deceptive external concrete plastering carried out by unlicensed contractors to conceal corroded reinforcement steel — “concrete cancer.”
• Enforce standards: require property owners and the municipality not to carry out any reinforcement works unless they are based on plans signed and certified by a licensed structural civil engineer from the Order of Engineers, while activating judicial oversight and the role of the Public Prosecutor to hold accountable any technical negligence that threatens residents’ lives.
Author’s Recommendations
These documented facts and verified data provide the legislative and technical foundation for launching legal accountability campaigns. Silence today is not helplessness; it is indirect complicity in the next crime. Saving the lives of Tripoli’s residents begins with dismantling the narrative of helplessness and imposing the language of numbers and strict accountability on every official who fails to fulfill their legal, rights-based, and constitutional responsibilities.
Related from Anahon: Lebanon 2026: Beyond the Numbers of Displacement · $1 Million in Urgent Support for Tripoli
