Mona Khalil, the Lebanese conservationist who built a decades-long movement to protect endangered sea turtles on a stretch of southern Lebanon’s coastline, died on June 19 from wounds sustained when an Israeli airstrike hit her beachside home — one of more than 4,000 people killed in the war between Israel and Hezbollah since it began on March 2.
Lebanese conservationist Mona Khalil was first introduced to a green sea turtle as she was drinking a beer on the beach and a female turtle laying eggs threw sand over her, according to a volunteer with the decades-long effort she began to save the endangered animals.
Khalil, 76, died Friday after an Israeli airstrike hit her beachside home two weeks ago. She’s credited with creating a conservation movement in southern Lebanon that protected sea turtle nesting grounds and southern Lebanon’s Mediterranean coast.
The accident of that encounter — a turtle throwing sand over a woman enjoying an evening drink on the beach — is the kind of small, almost comic origin story that belies the magnitude of what it eventually produced: more than two decades of dedicated conservation work that transformed a stretch of Lebanon’s coastline and trained an entire generation of Lebanese environmentalists.
A Life Built Around Returning
Khalil was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1949. She held Dutch as well as Lebanese citizenship, having lived in the Netherlands before returning to Lebanon and settling in what had once been her grandmother’s home – the building that would later become known as the Orange House.
She had not set out to become a conservationist. Born in Lagos to Lebanese parents, she later left Lebanon during the civil war. In the Netherlands she worked as a porcelain restorer, a trade that required patience, precision, and care for damaged things. She could have remained there. Instead she kept returning to the family land on Lebanon’s southern coast.
One night in 1999, while walking near the shore, she heard a sound in the sand and saw a turtle coming up to lay her eggs. She learned that the beach was one of the last important nesting places in southern Lebanon. In 2000, after Israel withdrew from the area, she returned more permanently. With Habiba Fayed, she restored the family farmhouse and began protecting the nests. The Orange House was named for the country that had sheltered her.
The choice to name her conservation project after the country that had given her refuge from Lebanon’s civil war — while devoting her life’s work to protecting Lebanon itself — is a detail that captures the layered loyalties at the heart of Khalil’s story: a woman shaped by displacement who chose, repeatedly, to return.
Decades of Patient, Physical Work
At night on Mansouri beach, the first evidence was often a track in the sand. The beach lies south of Tyre, near the border with Israel, where checkpoints, shelling, and evacuation orders have long shaped daily life. It is also one of Lebanon’s important nesting grounds for loggerhead and green sea turtles.
Her work was direct and exacting. She placed metal grids over nests to keep out predators while leaving space for hatchlings to escape. She moved eggs higher up the beach when flooding threatened them. She measured nests, counted eggs, recorded distances from the sea and vegetation, and shared data with conservation groups. She learned from scientists and then taught others. Much of the job came down to being there at the right hour, before a nest was lost.
“Through the Orange House, she inspired generations of Lebanese to value and protect their natural heritage and coastal ecosystems. Her work made her one of Lebanon’s most respected voices for marine conservation and biodiversity protection,” said the environmental group Green Southerners.
Khalil trained a generation of volunteers in ecological conservation, protecting the Mediterranean coastline and the endangered sea turtles that travel hundreds of miles to return to the same beaches where they were hatched to lay their eggs. Human encroachment, trash in the ocean and animal predators that eat the eggs and hatchlings mean newly hatched turtles have only about a 1 in 1,00[0 chance of surviving to adulthood].
A Fighter Who “Did Not Like Diplomacy”
Joumaa says Khalil’s work opposing the privatization of beaches and building along the southern coast eventually transformed the turtle nesting grounds into an officially recognized community-based conservation area. But these conservation efforts, including a successful campaign to ban the use of dynamite in fishing, didn’t always go smoothly. “Mona was a fighter. She did not like diplomacy. There were times when they shot at her house,” Joumaa says, referring to local opponents. “She always told me: Defend the beach, defend the turtles, defend your country.”
This put her in conflict with people who treated the shore as disposable. She challenged dynamite fishing, pollution, and construction that crowded the beach. She said she had been shot at and that people had tried to burn her house. She kept rescued animals in the courtyard and defended turtles with the same force she brought to arguments with officials and developers.
That Khalil had already faced violence — gunfire, attempted arson — from local opponents of her conservation work, years before the current war, adds a painful dimension to her death: the threats she ultimately could not survive came not from the developers and dynamite fishers she had spent decades resisting, but from a war that reached her home regardless of any of that local history.
She Stayed in 2024. The Army Made Her Leave.
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 ultimately persuaded her to evacuate for her safety. “She was the last one to leave the area,” Jomaa noted.
“She had an awful time in Beirut,” the journalist said, adding that Khalil longed to return to the south, to the Orange House and the beach she had spent years protecting. “She used to 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 used to say, ‘This is where you will bury me.'”
Fadia Joumaa, a former volunteer who took over the turtle conservation effort, says Khalil had vowed to stay in her home during the fighting, believing she was safe because she was a civilian and there were no nearby targets.
The Strike, and What Israel Has Said
Khalil’s home was reportedly hit by an Israeli airstrike on June 4, where she was seriously injured. Her assistant also suffered injuries and burns in the strike. Both were evacuated to a nearby hospital to recieve medical treatement, with Khalil later being transfered to the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) for futher treatement.
Her housekeeper, who is Ethiopian, sustained less-severe injuries in the attack, Khalil’s relatives said. The two women were the only occupants of what was known as “the Orange House” just steps from the al-Mansouri beach near the city of Tyre.
The Israeli military said last week in response to an NPR query that it had no indication it had hit the house but was reviewing its records. It did not respond to a query about when the review might be completed.
A Death Inside a Larger Toll
Israel has invaded southern Lebanon and is attacking what it says are Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters and infrastructure. The Lebanese health ministry says more than 4,000 people have been killed since the war began on March 2, including at least 600 women and children. Israel says 35 soldiers and a military contractor along with two civilians have been killed in Hezbollah attacks.
Khalil’s name now joins that figure — 4,000 and rising — as one of the specific, identifiable people inside a casualty count that, in its aggregate form, can become abstract. The fact that her death has prompted public mourning, formal eulogies from conservation groups, and detailed reporting from outlets across the world is itself a function of the specific, decades-long, internationally recognised body of work she left behind. The vast majority of the more than 4,000 names in that toll will not receive that same accounting.
“Her death stands as a stark reminder that the ongoing violence in southern Lebanon is exacting a devastating toll on civilians, environmental defenders, and the natural heritage they sought to protect,” Green Southerners wrote.
Mourners Gather in Beirut
Mourners have gathered in Beirut to pay their respects to a much-loved Lebanese conservationist who died from wounds caused by an Israeli strike on her home on the country’s southern coast… News of her death triggered 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.
It called for those responsible for the killings of Khalil and other civilians to be held accountable.
LoudFact.com is an independent global news and explainer platform. This report is based on reporting from NPR, Al Jazeera, the Jerusalem Post, and Mongabay as of June 21, 2026.
