Priceless heritage sites in Lebanon have sustained irreparable damage from Israel’s air campaign during its war against Hizbullah, experts say.
Lebanese cultural preservation organisation Biladi said at least nine heritage sites were completely destroyed and 15 badly or partially damaged by Israeli attacks between September – when the country escalated its year-long war with Hizbullah – and a ceasefire in November.
But archaeological experts also say bomb blasts close to important sites, including Roman ruins in the city of Baalbek and a sprawling Roman complex in Tyre, may have caused “invisible damage” that speeds up the degradation of ancient stone and weakened structures.
Lebanon’s treasures are the latest in the Middle East to be threatened by conflict this century, ranging from Islamic State’s deliberate destruction of temples in Syria’s Palmyra to damage to Yemen’s old city of Sana’a during the civil war.
The heritage sites which Biladi has assessed as having been obliterated or damaged include three mosques, a religious shrine, three historically significant houses, a market and a Roman wall.
Unesco’s regional office in Beirut said that an air strike destroyed a “modern building” within the boundaries of the world heritage site in Tyre, a coastal southern city famed for its Roman ruins and charming historic streets.
It added that while remote sensing had not yet found visible damage within the world heritage site at Baalbek, several structures nearby had been hit, including French mandate and Ottoman-era buildings.
Graham Philip, lead at Durham University for the endangered archaeology in the Middle East and north Africa project, said he did not believe that either Hizbullah or the Israeli military aimed “to deliberately destroy heritage in the way that Islamic State did”.
However, he warned that damage could happen anyway because “the sheer volume of bombs being dropped ...[was] way higher”.
Lisa Mol, professor of geomorphology and heritage in conflict at the University of the West of England, Bristol, said invisible damage was also a major risk as blast pressure speeds up erosion of stone even if it does not immediately appear to have destroyed anything.
Mol said that in her experience of working on archaeological sites affected by conflict in Libya and Yemen, “we do see more structural collapse” within a decade of near hits.
In response to questions, the Israeli military said in a statement that it “does not aim to cause excessive damage to civilian infrastructure and strikes only out of military necessity” and that it has an approval process for strikes near “sensitive structures”.
It accused Hizbullah of embedding in civilian populations and “even near cultural heritage sites”, without providing evidence or specific examples.
Lebanon’s heritage has been threatened before, first by the bitter 15-year civil war that began in 1975 and then by the devastating Beirut port blast in 2020.
The latest war began after Hizbullah started firing rockets into Israel following the Hamas-led attack on October 7th, 2023, prompting a grinding cross-border conflict that escalated when Israel stepped up its air campaign and launched a ground invasion in September. More than 4,000 people were killed in Lebanon, according to the health ministry, along with more than 140 Israelis.
After losing significant pieces to the 2020 port explosion, Nadine Panayot, curator of the Archaeological Museum at the American University of Beirut, created an underground bunker after the latest war to protect artefacts in the collection.
A responsibility to respect cultural heritage was written into the rules of war after the second World War, which destroyed cities from Dresden and Coventry to Hiroshima.
The UN’s heritage agency Unesco can declare sites to be under enhanced protection, as it did with 34 properties in Lebanon during the latest round of hostilities.
But it is very hard to hold rulebreakers accountable, said Francesco Bandarin, a former senior Unesco official. “You do have tools, but these tools are weak and limited,” he said.
For Sarkis Khoury, director general of antiquities at Lebanon’s culture ministry, the most painful losses have been the nearly 40 villages in south Lebanon completely demolished by the Israeli military, many of which date their history back thousands of years. In the weeks since the ceasefire took hold, the Israeli military has continued to detonate homes in southern Lebanon.
“The complete and systematic destruction of the historical memory of these villages is the most damaging thing,” said Khoury. “When you see a village with the olive [trees] and the ancient ruins, that’s Lebanon’s soul. That’s what’s being destroyed.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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