Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

The infrastructural damage

Israel damages $2 bln of Lebanon infrastructure
(Reuters) :: 2 August 2006
BEIRUT – Three weeks of Israeli bombardment has so far inflicted $2 billion of damage on Lebanon’s infrastructure, Transport and Public Works Minister Mohammed Al Safadi said on Wednesday. “Our preliminary valuation is about $2 billion,” he told Reuters.

“That’s roads, bridges, ports, the airport, until now.”

Safadi said it would take at least three months to bring Lebanon’s airport back up to full capacity after Israeli jets struck three runways.

A bridge on the international highway between Beirut and Damascus, the highest in the Middle East, will take around four years to rebuild, he said.

Israel launched a bombing campaign and ground incursions into Lebanon after Hizbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12.

The bombardment has cut off many roads, bridges and flyovers in the south and east of the country as well as putting the airport and ports out of action.

But it is lost business that will inflict the biggest costs on the Lebanese economy, though it is still too early to give any estimates, Safadi said.

“The biggest economic loss to the country is really for those who used the airport for trade and tourism,” he said.

“That is the government’s main income.”

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This entry was posted on 3 August, 2006 by in Israel Watch, Lebanon, Political Economy.

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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