October 24, 2026
In a fatal moment of abandonment, a passing dispute over moving a car a distance of no more than ten centimeters turned into a bloodbath that shocked the town of Majdalbana in the Aley district. Ghazi Abdel-Khaleq opened fire with his military machine gun at his relatives, in a horrific crime that resulted in the killing of the young man, Bahaa El-Din Abdel-Khaleq, and his father, Hatem, and the wounding of two other people from the same family, ending the evening of October 17, 2026, with a tragedy that will remain engraved in the town’s memory.
The spark of the disaster started from a simple daily detail in front of the perpetrator’s house on the ground floor, when Malak, the sister of the victim Bahaa El-Din, asked to remove a car blocking her path. Although the matter was limited to adjusting the distance by a few centimeters with the help of their relative Mamoun, the situation later developed after Bahaa El-Din arrived and parked a “Rapid” car in the same spot. This behavior sparked a heated argument with Ghazi, who considered that the vehicle was blocking the entrance to his house. The dispute took a violent and final turn when the latter decided to settle the discussion with weapons.
The facts of the investigations indicate that Ghazi pulled out a Kalashnikov machine gun that he was hiding inside one of the sofas in his house, ignoring his relative Mamoun’s desperate attempts to calm him down and pin him down from behind. As soon as he went out into the street, the shooter took a shooting position and directed his fire at Bahaa El-Din, who was about to get out of his car, ripping his body with about nine bullets. The bloody scene did not stop here. Rather, the random fire killed the young man’s father, Hatem, who happened to arrive at the place, in addition to wounding his uncle Ibrahim and their relative Mamoun, amid the panic of the latter’s son, who hid under a car to witness the killing of his relatives. Bahaa El-Din died from his wounds, and his father Hatem joined him after days of suffering in the hospital.
In an attempt to justify his crime, the perpetrator claimed during the investigations that he opened fire with the aim of intimidation, thinking that the victim was trying to pull out a weapon, claiming that his machine gun was set to automatic “shooting” mode without his knowledge. However, witness statements, including the child survivor, contradicted this account, confirming that Ghazi was the only gunman in the square and that he fired concentrated fire. After committing the crime, Ghazi tried to escape carrying a Val rifle by stopping a passing car, but quick communications with the mayor of Al-Mushrifa resulted in convincing him to surrender himself to an Army Intelligence patrol.
With the completion of the preliminary investigations, the crime scene being sealed with red wax, and the confiscation of weapons and ammunition, the Public Prosecutor of Appeal in Mount Lebanon, Judge Sami Sader, charged the detainee Ghazi Abdel Khaleq with crimes of premeditated murder and possession of military weapons based on Articles 547 of the Penal Code and 72 of Weapons, referring him to the first investigating judge, Nada Al-Asmar, to begin the chapters of judicial accountability for a crime that claimed innocent lives at an unbelievable price.
