What the Israel-Hezbollah war did to Lebanon’s cultural heritage sites

TIBNIN CASTLE, Southern Lebanon — The walls of a limestone citadel towering over olive groves near the frontiers of Lebanon, Syria and Israel tell the history of various civilizations that ruled here.

The castle’s foundations date back 3,000 years to the Bronze Age. The Crusaders rebuilt walls and added a turret. Arab, Ayyubid and Mamluk rulers all occupied this fortress over the centuries.

In late September, when Israel invaded Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah militants, the region around the castle of Tibnin (also called Toron) came under heavy bombardment. On Nov. 18, the United Nations announced it had added the castle and 33 other properties in Lebanon to its list of protected cultural sites, granting them “the highest level of immunity against attack.”

It wasn’t enough.

When NPR visited the castle in early December, one of its Crusader-era walls had crumbled. Its roof was strewn with debris from houses hit nearby by Israeli airstrikes. Israeli military drones were still buzzing around the fortress, and artillery boomed in the distance — despite a ceasefire that took effect Nov. 27.

“You feel inside that something’s been cut from you,” says Ali Fawaz, a municipal official who fled north during the heaviest fighting and returned to find his town’s beloved landmark damaged. “It’s our history.“

Lebanon is a small country chockful of antiquities: Crusader castles like Tibnin’s, Ottoman architecture, Roman and Phoenician ruins. In addition to more than 4,000 people killed in Lebanon by attacks Israel says were aimed at Hezbollah, the war leveled huge swaths of the country. The World Bank estimates economic losses at $8.5 billion.

Now, under a shaky ceasefire, officials are only beginning to assess damage to homes and antiquities alike.

Possible damage to UNESCO World Heritage Sites

In the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre, on Lebanon’s south coast, a colonnaded Roman road stretches down to the Mediterranean Sea. The Greeks settled here as early as the 5th century BCE, millennia before Alexander the Great invaded. There are Corinthian columns, vestiges of Roman baths, mosaics and a necropolis.

Today the city’s ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the roof of a ticket office is painted with the shape of a massive blue and white shield. It’s a symbol marking the area as protected cultural property under a 1954 Hague Convention, which Israel and Lebanon have both signed.

“It’s visible by warplanes, so the ruins can be protected,” says Mahmoud Ghazal, a local archaeologist and tour guide who showed NPR around the site in early December.

The ruins were spared direct attack, but the surrounding city of Tyre — where Hezbollah still enjoys wide support — took a pounding from Israeli warplanes. Archaeologists have yet to X-ray the ancient columns for possible hairline fractures from the force of months of explosions around them, Ghazal says.

Like Tibnin Castle, all of Tyre’s archaeological ruins beyond the boundaries of the city’s UNESCO World Heritage Site were among 34 sites added to the U.N.’s protection list on Nov. 18. But by then, they had already sustained damage: A Byzantine-era fortification had been destroyed. Ottoman-era homes in the city’s old quarter collapsed.

“Windows shattered, doors blown off their joints by the force of blasts,” Ghazal says, stepping over rubble. “I feel so sad, seeing my city injured.”

The same is true for areas around other UNESCO World Heritage Sites where fighting has taken place: The Greco-Roman temples of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon, and the Neolithic, Roman and Persian ruins of Palmyra in nearby Syria. Their main monuments remain standing, but it’s unclear whether they’ve suffered internal structural damage.

In a parking lot next to Baalbek’s ancient Roman temples to Venus, Jupiter and Bacchus, there’s a giant crater from an Israeli airstrike that destroyed a hotel and shop.

Damage to churches and mosques

Israel accuses Hezbollah of hiding weapons and fighters in religious and cultural sites.

On Nov. 20, an Israeli soldier and a civilian Israeli archaeologist were killed in what Israeli media described as an attack by Hezbollah fighters “hiding” in a Crusader fortress, Chamaa Castle, in southern Lebanon.

Israel often issues civilian evacuation orders before it attacks. But in the village of Derdghaya, in Lebanon’s south, local officials say a cluster of Israeli airstrikes hit on Oct. 9 without warning, killing eight people in and around a 19th century Greek Catholic Church.

One wall of the church was sheared off. Crucifixes, crystal chandeliers and paintings of saints lay in the rubble. When NPR visited, part of the ceiling dangled precariously.

“We remained in our village throughout the war, working with Lebanese civil defense teams to stockpile relief supplies in our local church,” says Ali Nazzal, whose brother Mohammed Nazzal was among the dead. “I left to drive some elderly neighbors to safety in Beirut, and my brother stayed back. That’s when they were hit.”

In a WhatsApp message to NPR, the Israeli military confirmed the Derdghaya airstrikes, but said they targeted what it calls “terrorists” who “unlawfully embed near or underneath cultural sites.”

Three days later, on Oct. 12, in a neighboring village called Kfar Tebnit, an attack felled the minaret of an Ottoman-era mosque neighbors say was 250 years old.

It still lay in the street when NPR visited in early December. Loudspeakers that once broadcast the call to prayer were bent and burned. Dusty, torn pages of the Quran were visible under rubble.

“Google it! This is a famous mosque,” says Najib Yasin, whose home across the street was damaged. “And nobody has come to log the damage to our landmark — not the United Nations, not the government, not anyone.”

Logging damage to heritage homes

In Nabatieh, a regional capital in Lebanon’s south, a 13th century Mamluk-era market was destroyed, along with hundreds of more modern buildings.

“When you keep monuments standing, then you can keep history alive,” says Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly, a Lebanese archaeologist who runs Biladi, an organization focused on preserving the country’s heritage.

Since the ceasefire, Bajjaly has been traveling around to properties on Lebanon’s national register of historic buildings to see if they’re still standing.

She showed NPR a late Ottoman-style house in Nabatieh that was damaged in the 2006 war with Israel, rebuilt into a cultural center and damaged again in November.

“Destroying this is not just destroying a house,” Bajjaly says. “It’s actually destroying everything that’s attached to it — history, memory.”

With Bajjaly is photographer Kamel Jaber, who’s spent his career documenting Lebanon’s old houses. For many of these properties, he’s got the “before” pictures, and is now taking the “after” ones.

Jaber says he doesn’t believe there were any Hezbollah fighters in these heritage homes. He thinks that with these strikes, Israel was intentionally targeting Lebanon’s antiquities — its history and thus its claim to this land.

“These are the places where the scent of our ancestors still lingers,” Jaber says.

As in Gaza, Israel’s military denies that its intention has been to lay waste to Lebanon’s residential areas or cultural sites — and says only that it is responding to militant attacks that come from those very areas.

“Each strike that poses a risk to a sensitive structure is weighed carefully and goes through a rigorous approval process as required,” the Israeli military told NPR in another WhatsApp message.

Deliberately targeting cultural heritage sites during conflict is considered a war crime.

NPR producer Jawad Rizkallah contributed to this report.