Onlookers cheer in support as customers use pellet guns and toy weapons in efforts to retrieve frozen funds

It is a crime spree without precedent in Lebanon. Assailants have stormed banks across the cash-strapped country to demand access to their own money, with crowds often gathering outside to cheer them on.

At least five Lebanese banks were targeted on Friday in addition to two on Wednesday and another last month, the robbers becoming instant heroes in a country where citizens have been cut off from their funds for nearly three years during one of its worst financial crises on record.

Sali Hafez took $13,000 from her frozen bank account ‘to pay for sister’s cancer treatment’

A woman accompanied by activists and brandishing what she said was a toy pistol broke into a Beirut bank branch and took $13,000 from her trapped savings.

One witness said the intruders doused the inside of the bank with petrol and threatened to set it alight during the incident, which was live-streamed on Facebook.

Public rallies around gunman who surrendered after bank agreed to give him funds for father’s medical bills

An armed man has emerged as an unlikely hero in Lebanon after holding hostages in a central Beirut bank and demanding access to his own money – a move that generated broad public support.

Brandishing a rifle and threatening to douse himself with petrol, Bassam al-Sheikh Hussein, entered the Federal Bank branch about noon on Thursday and insisted on withdrawing part of his frozen savings of $210,000 (£172,000) to help pay for his father’s hospital bill.