Hospitals in blast-hit north Lebanon grapple with outages

Lights and phone lines went out across the impoverished and marginalised region that has long suffered from an ailing power grid but that is now grappling with an unprecedented crisis due to severe diesel shortages nationwide.

The outages come less than two days after a fuel tank exploded in the village of Al-Tleil, scorching people clamouring to fill petrol that the army was distributing.

Around 80 people, including several soldiers, were injured, many of them left with severe burns, overwhelming hospitals.

Fuel shortages since the start of summer have aggravated hardship in Lebanon, a country of more than six million that is in the throes of an economic crisis branded by the World Bank as one of the worst since the mid-19th century.

In Akkar, hospitals still storing corpses of victims charred in Sunday's blast were left without power, internet and working landlines, as health officials pleaded for help from the authorities.

The nearby El-Youssef hospital also had enough stock of diesel to last until Wednesday morning and no working phone lines, said Nathaline el-Chaar, assistant to the director.