Lebanese environmental activist Mona Khalil, whose work helped turn a stretch of coastline in southern Lebanon into one of the eastern Mediterranean’s most important nesting sites for endangered sea turtles, has died after being wounded in an Israeli strike.<\/p>\n
Khalil, 76, was injured when her house on Mansouri beach, near the southern city of Tyre, was hit during Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon two weeks ago.<\/p>\n
She died on Friday after several days in hospital, according to a local environmental group.<\/p>\n
Her death came as Israeli air strikes intensified across southern Lebanon, raising concerns about renewed violence despite diplomatic efforts to maintain a fragile regional peace.<\/p>\n
The BBC has reached out to the Israeli military for a response.<\/p>\n
“She is a deeply committed environmental defender,” Hisham Younes, the founder and president of Green Southerners, told the BBC.<\/p>\n
“She used to talk about the beach like it was a person. Her bond to the sunset, her bond to the water and the turtles\u2026.she was really into conservation, and into the soul, the spirit of conservation.”<\/p>\n
For more than 25 years, Khalil dedicated herself to protecting endangered loggerhead and green sea turtles that nest along Lebanon’s southern coast.<\/p>\n
Her conservation work began after what her loved ones described as a life-changing encounter with a turtle laying eggs on Mansouri beach in 1999.<\/p>\n
A refugee of the Lebanese civil war, Khalil was living in the Netherlands but had returned to visit her family’s seaside home.<\/p>\n
She was on the beach one night and saw a green turtle laying eggs on the beach.<\/p>\n
After learning that sea turtle populations in Lebanon were under threat, she committed herself to protecting them and later returned permanently to the country.<\/p>\n
Fast forward a year to 2000, and she helped establish the Orange House Project, an eco-tourism and conservation initiative overlooking Mansouri beach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lebanese environmental activist Mona Khalil, whose work helped turn a stretch of coastline in southern Lebanon into one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-649467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}