Beirut explosion: video analysis

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It's been more than 24 hours since a giant explosion tore through the Lebanese capital of Beirut.

It's killed at least 135 people and injured some 5,000. By far the biggest explosion that's ever happened in Lebanon, a country that's seen massive explosions in political assassinations and wars in the past.

The question now is how will Lebanon rebuild. This country is functionally bankrupt. Its government defaulted on its debts in March. It's in the middle of a huge economic crisis. Its local currency has lost 80 per cent of its value compared to the pegged exchange rate against the dollar. There were already huge waves of unemployment and people's purchasing power was already severely eroded as runaway inflation was pushing up prices.

We know now from Lebanese officials that the explosion was caused by 2,700 tonnes of a chemical compound called ammonium nitrate which was being stored at the port of Beirut. It appears that this shipment that had arrived at the port had been impounded there had been there for six years despite the fact that this had been flagged multiple times by various customs authorities who were asking for that shipment to be removed from the port.

Now if you're thinking about, can you trust authorities to rebuild your city after you found out that they have neglected a giant stash of highly explosive material that was sitting right in the middle of its main trading hub, I think it's fair to say it's difficult to have much confidence in those authorities to fix the problems that their negligence appears to have caused. I think that's the attitude that a lot of Lebanese people have right now towards the state of Lebanon that has brought them to this situation.

So will that cause a big wave of public anger? Lebanon had mass protests that started in October last year, went on for several months, with people demonstrating against political corruption and mismanagement of the state. Do people have enough energy to go out and protest? At the moment everyone's so shell-shocked. We've seen small eruptions of anger targeted at Saad Hariri, the ex-prime minister of Lebanon whose convoy went to visit the devastated downtown area. Protesters threw rocks at that convoy.

We don't know what's going to happen. It seems very unlikely that people will not have something say about a huge disaster that's killed well over 100 people and injured 5,000 and made hundreds of thousands homeless. So we wait to see what will happen there. But the disaster itself reflects a lot of the problems with the Lebanese state.