Lebanon’s Interior Minister Says Willing to Hold Parliamentary Elections Earlier

President Michel Aoun met with Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi at Baabda Palace on Tuesday. (NNA)
President Michel Aoun met with Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi at Baabda Palace on Tuesday. (NNA)
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Lebanon’s Interior Minister Says Willing to Hold Parliamentary Elections Earlier

President Michel Aoun met with Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi at Baabda Palace on Tuesday. (NNA)
President Michel Aoun met with Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi at Baabda Palace on Tuesday. (NNA)

Lebanon’s new Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi said that preparations were underway to hold parliamentary elections next year.

In a statement, the office of the Lebanese Presidency said that President Michel Aoun met with Mawlawi on Thursday to discuss the security situation and the preparations for the polls, which are scheduled to be held in May.

In response to a question about whether there was an amendment to the proposed date for the elections, the minister replied: “If elections will be held in March, a legal amendment must be issued.”

“I have no objections to holding elections in March in accordance with the law. The parliament’s mandate ends on May 21, and we have committed, in the ministerial policy statement, to hold the vote before this date.”

Asked about the role of expatriates in the elections, Mawlawi said: “There is a committee, according to the law, formed by the ministries of interior and foreign affairs to discuss this issue.”

On whether the electoral magnetic card will be adopted, the minister told reporters at the Baabda Palace: “If there is an intention to launch this card, and if the government proceeds with it, we welcome that. This will speed up the counting process.”

He continued: “We are currently conducting an assessment of the cost of the elections to be presented to concerned parties to find out how to secure the funds.”



Israel’s Military Admits to Shooting at Ambulances in Gaza

 Palestinians buy clothes in a shop next to a destroyed apartment building in preparation for Eid al-Fitr celebrations at Al-Rimal neighborhood in the center of Gaza City Friday March 28, 2025.(AP)
Palestinians buy clothes in a shop next to a destroyed apartment building in preparation for Eid al-Fitr celebrations at Al-Rimal neighborhood in the center of Gaza City Friday March 28, 2025.(AP)
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Israel’s Military Admits to Shooting at Ambulances in Gaza

 Palestinians buy clothes in a shop next to a destroyed apartment building in preparation for Eid al-Fitr celebrations at Al-Rimal neighborhood in the center of Gaza City Friday March 28, 2025.(AP)
Palestinians buy clothes in a shop next to a destroyed apartment building in preparation for Eid al-Fitr celebrations at Al-Rimal neighborhood in the center of Gaza City Friday March 28, 2025.(AP)

Israel’s military admitted Saturday it had fired on ambulances in the Gaza Strip after identifying them as “suspicious vehicles,” with Hamas condemning it as a “war crime” that killed at least one person.

The incident took place last Sunday in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood in the southern city of Rafah, close to the Egyptian border.

Israeli troops launched an offensive there on March 20, two days after the army resumed aerial bombardments of Gaza following an almost two-month-long truce.

Israeli troops had “opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists,” the military said in a statement to AFP.

“A few minutes afterward, additional vehicles advanced suspiciously toward the troops... The troops responded by firing toward the suspicious vehicles, eliminating a number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.”

The military did not say if there was fire coming from the vehicles.

It added that “after an initial inquiry, it was determined that some of the suspicious vehicles... were ambulances and fire trucks,” and condemned “the repeated use” by “terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip of ambulances for terrorist purposes.”

The day after the incident, Gaza’s Civil Defense agency said in a statement that it had not heard from a team of six rescuers from Tal al-Sultan who had been urgently dispatched to respond to deaths and injuries.

On Friday, it reported finding the body of the team leader and the rescue vehicles—an ambulance and a firefighting vehicle—and said a vehicle from the Palestine Red Crescent Society was also “reduced to a pile of scrap metal.”

Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, accused Israel of carrying out “a deliberate and brutal massacre against Civil Defense and Palestinian Red Crescent teams in the city of Rafah.”

“The targeted killing of rescue workers—who are protected under international humanitarian law—constitutes a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime,” he said.

Tom Fletcher, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said that since March 18, “Israeli airstrikes in densely populated areas have killed hundreds of children and other civilians.”

“Patients killed in their hospital beds. Ambulances shot at. First responders killed,” he said in a statement.

“If the basic principles of humanitarian law still count, the international community must act while it can to uphold them.”