by Our Foreign Desk

SIX Hezbollah ministers and their allies walked out of a Lebanese cabinet meeting on the political crisis after four hours yesterday.

Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, whose Free Patriotic Movement is aligned with Hezbollah, said he was leaving in disgust at the “theatre” being played out over mass protests prompted by a breakdown in refuse collection.

Hezbollah later issued a statement saying that it supported peaceful protest against “endemic corruption,” calling it a legitimate right.

It suggested that the Islamist group was throwing its weight behind the You Stink protest movement now calling on the government to resign.

The cabinet also unanimously rejected the winning bidders to manage Beirut’s rubbish collection announced by the environment minister a day earlier, citing high costs.

Lebanon’s multipartisan power-sharing government has been without a president for more than a year and parliament has extended its term twice without elections.

Meanwhile, intense clashes continued yesterday in Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp between Islamist factions Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam and the Palestinian Fatah movement, killing three people and forcing hundreds to flee.

The fighting, which began Saturday in the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp near the southern port city of Sidon, followed a failed assassination attempt targeting a Fatah party official. Three people were killed on Saturday.

Rockets and heavy machine gunfire caused serious damage to homes and wounded at least 20 people. A ceasefire was reached later on Tuesday.