Mona Khalil died on June 19 after being wounded when an Israeli strike hit her home at Mansouri beach in southern Lebanon.For more than 25 years, she protected endangered loggerhead and green sea turtles that nested on a narrow stretch of coast near Tyre.She left a settled life in the Netherlands to return to Lebanon, where she turned her family home into the Orange House, a conservation project and guesthouse.Her work combined daily field labor, public education, local advocacy, and resistance to pollution, dynamite fishing, coastal development, and war.
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. The turtles come ashore after dark. They dig, lay, cover, and return to the water.
For the hatchlings, the distance from nest to sea is only a few yards. It is still dangerous. Dogs and foxes dig up eggs. Crabs and birds take the young. Lights from roads and resorts pull them away from the water. Plastic drifts offshore. Fishing nets catch adults that have survived for decades. Even a footprint can trap a turtle no bigger than a child’s palm.
