Mourners gather to remember Lebanese conservationist killed by Israel | Israel attacked Lebanon News

Prominent turtle defender Mona Khalil was injured in an Israeli attack in southern Lebanon.

Mourners have gathered in Beirut to pay their respects to a beloved Lebanese conservationist who died from injuries sustained in an Israeli strike on her home on the country’s southern coast.

Mona Khalil, 77, who has protected sea turtles along the Lebanese coast for more than two decades, was seriously injured in the attack in the village of al-Mansouri in Tire province on June 4 and died of her injuries more than two weeks later, on Friday.

News of her death caused an outpouring of grief among environmentalists and those who volunteered and worked with her over the years, many of whom gathered in Beirut on Sunday.

The Orange House project, which Khalil helped build into a small conservation center and ecotourism facility in al-Mansoura, has become a refuge for endangered loggerhead and green sea turtles and a training ground for volunteers documenting nesting activity along the coast.

Khalil was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1949. She held Dutch as well as Lebanese citizenship, living in the Netherlands before returning to Lebanon and settling in what was once her grandmother’s home, a building that would later become known as the Orange House.

Khalil’s work centered on a narrow stretch of coastline, Al Mansouri Beach, where a fleeting encounter with a turtle emerging from the ocean to lay eggs in 1999 spurred her on a lifelong journey dedicated to animals.

Each nesting season, Khalil and volunteers patrol the beach at night, marking fresh footprints in the sand and carefully moving vulnerable nests away from human activity and coastal light pollution.

Journalist and environmental activist Fadia Jomaa first met Khalil in 2016 while researching sea turtles in Lebanon, and later decided to volunteer with her project.

During the previous war between Israel and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah in 2024, Khalil initially refused to leave Al-Mansouri Beach, Jomaa said. The Lebanese army eventually convinced her to evacuate for her safety.

“She was the last one to leave the area,” Jomaa noted.

“She had a terrible time in Beirut,” the journalist said, adding that Khalil dreamed of returning to the south, to the Orange House and the beach she had protected for years.

“She would say, ‘My soul will stay here,'” Jomaa said, recalling conversations in which Khalil would point to an olive tree or a small hill overlooking Al Mansouri Beach. “She said, ‘This is where you’re going to bury me.’

According to Jomaa, the location where Khalil will ultimately be buried remains uncertain and depends on the security situation in the area.