Holiday Inn Beirut

[4] It was part of a mixed-use complex known as St. Charles City Center, including a cinema, offices, shops, restaurants, a supermarket.

[5] The Holiday Inn opened in 1974, at the height of Beirut's economic boom, when the city was the glamorous tourist center of the Middle East.

The Holiday Inn operated normally for only a year before the civil war broke out in 1975, and by then, the hotel was in the focal point of a war zone beginning on October 25, 1975[4] in a months-long conflict known as the Battle of the Hotels, as over 25,000 combatants from pro-Palestinian and Christian militias fought for control of a group of towering luxury hotels including the Holiday Inn and the adjacent Phoenicia Inter-Continental, resulting in over 1,000 deaths (many of those who died were thrown from the top of the Holiday Inn)[2] and 2,000 injuries.

[6] The hotel was seen as a heavily symbolic goal by both sides in the conflict, and fighting for it was fierce, finally ending on March 21, 1976.

[6] As a result of the disagreement, it remains empty and untouched, decades after the war and its brief year of operation; due to its strategic location in Beirut's city centre, the ruined hotel and its immediate surrounding ground level areas were declared a military zone under the control of the Lebanese Army, which currently restricts access to civilians.