At 6:08 on the evening of Tuesday, 4 August 2020, in Warehouse 12 at the Port of Beirut, approximately 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate that had been stored loosely in plastic-lined sacks since the fall of 2014 detonated in a single explosion equivalent to roughly 1.1 kilotons of TNT. The blast killed at least 218 people, injured more than 7,000, displaced approximately 300,000 from their damaged or destroyed homes, and registered as a magnitude 3.3 seismic event on stations as far away as Cyprus. It is, by current count, the third-largest non-nuclear explosion in human history, after the Halifax explosion of 1917 and the British N1 explosive tests at Heligoland in 1947.
The chemistry was identical to the Texas City disaster of 16 April 1947. The negligence was, in several ways, worse. The cargo had been impounded by Lebanese customs authorities in 2014, after the freighter carrying it had been seized in port for unrelated regulatory violations. It had then been moved to Warehouse 12 and left there. Customs officials, port authorities, and the Lebanese General Security service had written, by the most thorough later count, at least ten formal letters and reports between 2014 and 2020 warning that the cargo was a serious safety hazard and asking for it to be moved or destroyed. The letters were received. They were acknowledged. They were filed. Nothing happened.
On the afternoon of 4 August 2020, a separate small fire at Warehouse 12 — most likely caused by welding work being done on the warehouse’s main entrance, though this remains officially disputed — ignited a cache of fireworks that had been stored next to the ammonium nitrate. The fireworks burned for about half an hour, visible from much of central Beirut and filmed by hundreds of phones. Then the ammonium nitrate went up.
The Rhosus
The cargo had come from a Russian-owned, Moldovan-flagged general freighter named MV Rhosus. The ship had loaded the ammonium nitrate in the port of Batumi, Georgia, in September 2013, bound for Beira, Mozambique, where the chemical was to be sold to a commercial explosives company for use in mining operations. The shipper was a Mozambican import agent. The buyer was a Mozambican mining-explosives firm. The voyage from Batumi to Beira would normally take about three weeks. The Rhosus never arrived.
According to her captain, Boris Prokoshev — a Russian merchant master in his fifties, working under contract to a Cypriot shipowning company — the ship had been in poor mechanical condition before sailing. She was running with a skeleton crew of ten (six Ukrainians, three Bangladeshis, the Russian captain). She had been short on fuel and short on cash for the harbor fees that Mediterranean ports required. The Cypriot shipowner, a Russian-Cypriot businessman named Igor Grechushkin, instructed the captain to make an unscheduled call at Beirut in November 2013 to pick up additional cargo — heavy equipment that would generate fees to pay for the fuel needed to continue the voyage.
The Rhosus arrived in Beirut on 20 November 2013. The Lebanese port authority inspected her, found her unseaworthy, and detained her. The owner declared bankruptcy and abandoned both the ship and the crew. The captain and the three Bangladeshi sailors remained aboard, unpaid, for the next eleven months — under a Lebanese maritime court order that prevented them from leaving the ship — until a humanitarian campaign by the International Transport Workers’ Federation secured their release in October 2014. The captain went home to Russia.
The ship was eventually allowed to leave Beirut in 2014. She had been towed out of the harbor and abandoned, where, by most accounts, she eventually sank in deep water sometime in 2018. The ammonium nitrate had been offloaded into Warehouse 12 in the fall of 2014. The warehouse’s east wall had a hole in it from prior storm damage. The roof leaked. The cargo was placed against the wall in 2,750 sacks, each weighing one metric ton, stacked four sacks high.
No one ever came to collect it. The Mozambican buyer had moved on. The Mozambican import agent had moved on. The shipowner had vanished into the back-end of Cypriot corporate filings. The Lebanese state, which technically owned the cargo by way of the customs lien against the abandoned ship, had no use for it and no budget to dispose of it. So it sat.
What the warnings said
The warnings began in 2014, within weeks of the cargo arriving in the warehouse. The most explicit, written by the customs director Shafik Merhi in June 2014, asked the urgent administrative judge in Beirut for permission to either re-export the cargo, sell it to the Lebanese armed forces (who could use it for legitimate explosives manufacture), or transfer it to a chemical-specialist warehouse. The letter received no response. Merhi sent a second letter in December 2014. No response. He sent four more letters across 2015 and 2016. Each was filed and ignored.
His successor, the customs director Badri Daher, sent eight more letters between 2016 and 2020. Each described the cargo as extremely dangerous. The last, in May 2020 — three months before the explosion — specifically warned that any fire at Warehouse 12 would have catastrophic consequences for the surrounding city. The Lebanese General Security director Abbas Ibrahim wrote a formal report in July 2020 recommending the immediate disposal of the cargo. The report was hand-delivered to the office of the Prime Minister, Hassan Diab. It is not clear whether Diab read it. He has denied seeing it.
The Human Rights Watch investigation published in August 2021, after a year of document review and interviews, concluded that “Lebanese authorities knowingly created a situation in which ordinary residents and workers were at high risk of being killed.” The report named twenty-two senior Lebanese officials by name — the President, the Prime Minister, the Speaker of Parliament, multiple ministers, the heads of customs and security and the army — as having been informed of the risk in writing during the six years preceding the explosion. The report’s title was “They Killed Us from the Inside,” a quotation from a survivor.
The 33 seconds
The fireworks fire began in Warehouse 12 at approximately 5:54 p.m. on 4 August. The first fire engines from the Beirut Fire Brigade arrived at 6:00. Ten firefighters and one paramedic entered the warehouse to fight the fire. All eleven were killed in the explosion at 6:08. Their bodies were not recovered for several days. The team had been told they were responding to a normal warehouse fire. They had not been told about the ammonium nitrate.
The visible fireworks display was filmed, as it happened, by hundreds of bystanders on rooftops and apartment balconies across the city. Several of the recordings continue, by chance, through the moment of the main explosion. They show, in slow-motion replay, a small mushroom cloud rising from the warehouse, a hemispherical shockwave expanding outward at the speed of sound, the camera being knocked from the cameraman’s hand. Many of the cameramen did not survive long enough to retrieve their phones; the footage was recovered later from the phones lying in the rubble.
The blast destroyed roughly half of central Beirut. The neighborhoods of Karantina (adjacent to the port), Gemmayzeh, Mar Mikhael, and large parts of Achrafieh were structurally devastated. Approximately 70,000 housing units were rendered uninhabitable. The estimated property damage exceeded $15 billion in a country whose entire GDP that year was approximately $33 billion and whose currency was simultaneously collapsing in an ongoing economic crisis.
The shockwave was felt 240 kilometers away in Cyprus. Windows broke in apartments in Famagusta. The Lebanese government declared a two-week state of emergency. The Prime Minister, Hassan Diab, resigned on 10 August 2020, six days after the explosion, citing the explosion as evidence of “systemic corruption” in the Lebanese state — a state of which he had been the head for less than a year.
The investigation
The Lebanese criminal investigation, led by judge Tarek Bitar, has been ongoing since August 2020. As of 2026, no senior official has been convicted of any crime in connection with the explosion. The investigation has been repeatedly suspended by procedural appeals filed by the very officials accused. The Lebanese constitutional court has not ruled definitively on the appeals.
International investigations — including the FBI’s forensic analysis of the blast (declassified in 2020) and the French gendarmerie’s parallel investigation (still classified) — confirmed the cause as ammonium nitrate detonation. They did not produce criminal charges; foreign investigations have no Lebanese jurisdiction.
The Beirut port has been partially rebuilt. The grain silo that stood between Warehouse 12 and the city center, which absorbed a substantial fraction of the blast wave on its way inland, is still standing in part — eight of its forty-eight concrete cells survived the explosion and have been left as a memorial. The cells, viewed from the highway above the port, look like a row of ruined teeth.
A small plaque was added to the silo wall in August 2024, on the fourth anniversary, listing the names of the 218 known dead. The list is alphabetical. It includes the ten firefighters and the paramedic. It includes Sahar Fares, the only female firefighter in the unit, whose family in southern Lebanon had received her engagement ring back through the mail two weeks before the explosion.
The plaque does not name the officials who left the warehouse standing.