Mona Khalil, sea turtle conservationist, killed in Israeli strike in Lebanon

When war arrived again in Lebanon, Mona Khalil refused to abandon her beloved beachfront home or the endangered sea turtles she had dedicated her life to protecting.

During the last conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in 2024, the environmental activist reluctantly fled her property in the southern Lebanese village of Al-Mansouri, which doubles as a marine conservation area, and took refuge in Beirut.

Her friends say she resented every second of being driven from her home. So when war began anew in March, Khalil stayed put. 

She died on Friday from wounds sustained in an Israeli strike on her home earlier this month. She was 76.

“She chose her own destiny,” Assad Serhal, Khalil’s friend and fellow conservationist, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “She wanted to die there, and she did.”

‘A one-in-a-billion person’

On June 4, an Israeli strike hit Khalil’s house. Her assistant, an Ethiopian woman, is recovering from burns, according to the Guardian. But Khalil succumbed to her wounds in a Beirut hospital.

In a statement, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said Khalil “was not a target” and that “there is no known IDF strike in which she was injured.”

It added that strikes were conducted in the area after issuing evacuation warnings and it “deeply regrets any harm caused to civilians.”

According to Lebanon’s health ministry, more than 4,000 people have been killed in Israeli strikes since the latest Israel-Hezbollah war began in March.

Some violence has continued since a fragile ceasefire was reached on Saturday.

Khalil, a Nigerian-born citizen of Lebanon and the Netherlands, spent more than two decades protecting sea turtles along Al-Mansouri’s coastline.   

In 2000, she and her partner, Habiba Fayed, turned property she inherited from her grandmother into a refuge for endangered loggerhead and green sea turtles. They also converted her home, The Orange House, into a ecotourism bed-and-breakfast, and training ground for volunteers documenting nesting activity along the coast.

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

During the summer nesting season, she organized sea turtle hatchling viewings for visitors.

“I think she’s a one-in-a-billion person,” said Serhal, co-founder of The Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon. “War is cruel.”

A huge impact on conservationists

Serhal says when he first met Khalil in 2006, she was wary of him and mistrustful of organizations.

“She didn’t like me much,” he said with a chuckle.

His goal was to convince her to join forces with him to turn her beachfront property into a hima, a type of community-based conservation area with roots in Islam.

“I told her one day all of us will leave, one way or another, and who’s going to protect these sea turtles that you now protect so dearly?” he said. “I think it resonated.”

He says he remembers staying up one night talking with Khalil until 4 a.m., when she revealed that she fell in love with sea turtles after the death of her son.

He says she told him that each turtle she saw reminded her of her child, and she wanted to dedicate her life’s work to him. Serhal says he promised to help make it happen.

“I think that’s when we became friends,” he said.

That year, the Hima Qoleileh–Mansouri was created, protecting seven kilometres of coastline in southern Lebanon by law.

News of Khalil’s death drew an outpouring of grief from those who worked with her over the years, many of whom gathered in Beirut on Sunday to mourn her.

Among them was journalist and environmental activist Fadia Jomaa, who met Khalil in 2016 while researching sea turtles in Lebanon and then decided to volunteer with her Orange House Project.

“This relationship didn’t stop at being a volunteering relationship,” Jomaa said. “Mona became our mother.”

Johnny Baaklini, another former volunteer at the Orange House, agreed. 

“[She] treated us, the conservation advocates, like her kids,” he said. “It feels impossible to describe the impact Mona personally had on me and on so many other young naturalists.”

Serhal says Khalil’s impact will be felt far and wide for generations to come. He says Hima Qoleileh–Mansouri is home to a diverse population of migrating birds and marline life, including Khalil’s beloved turtles.

Thanks to Khalil, he says, “we know that the turtles will always have a place to come back home to.”