Barricades appeared in the streets of Beirut, and protesters burned police cars.
The rallies caused a sharp decline in the national currency: pounds fell by a quarter in a few hours. The country’s economy is in its most deplorable condition in half a century: it has experienced a technical default, collapsed by 11 percent of national GDP, and half of the population lives in extreme poverty. With the introduction of the coronavirus quarantine in Lebanon, a so-called hungry revolution began.