Lebanese Phalangist MP Antoine Ghanem has been killed in a massive car-bomb in Beirut. Coming almost exactly 25 years after the assassination of Phalangist president Bashir Gemayel set off the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, this murder whittles the parliamentary majority of the Ceders Bloc down to just one MP — raising the spectre that the Hezbollah-Auon bloc may soon be in the majority.

A constitutional crisis looms — with the civil disaster that could entail.