Oussama Baher often drank his coffee while contemplating Tyre’s ancient Roman ruins. This was the only place where he felt safe during the war in Lebanon, he said.
At the entrance, a plaque proudly marks the site's inclusion on Unesco's World Heritage List, declaring that such places “must be protected for the benefit of all humanity”.
Wrongly, Mr Baher thought this would safeguard the site from the Israeli strikes indiscriminately pummelling the port city.
In early June, an Israeli air strike obliterated one of Tyre's oldest traditional houses next to the Al Bass archaeological site, damaging its entrance. The blast hurled debris into the site, decapitating one of the Roman columns.
Mr Baher saw the whole scene. “I would never have thought they would strike here,” he said during The National’s visit to Tyre last week, before the announcement of an interim US-Iran deal aimed at ending the regional war. The deal has reduced fighting in Lebanon but so far failed to stop it completely.
The sign identifying a World Heritage Site now has an unwieldy crack across its marble surface. But the attack has not stopped Mr Baher from enjoying his coffee among the Roman ruins.
“Nowhere is safe anyway,” he said.
When The National visited the site, which includes a Roman hippodrome that extends towards the Mediterranean coast, it was mostly empty and rescue workers were digging through the rubble of the destroyed house.
The Israeli bombing was not an exception but the norm. Since war broke out yet again between Israel and Hezbollah in early March, south Lebanon's rich array of archaeological sites has come under attack.
The war has killed thousands of people, displaced more than a million and inflicted billions of dollars' worth of economic damage. But Lebanon's cultural heart has also been a casualty.
“There are different ways of razing someone's resources. This also applies to memory,” said Ghassan Salameh, Lebanon's Minister of Culture. “What is the value of a particular site or building? Of course the aesthetic part is there for everyone to enjoy. But what is important for the inhabitants, the residents, is that this is part of their memory.”
Mr Salameh, a highly respected academic who was head of the UN Support Mission to Libya from 2017 to 2020, was speaking to The National from Lebanon's National Library, the location of perhaps the country's most majestic ministry.
'Cherished collective memory'
He lamented the demise of another library in Bint Jbeil, a major southern Lebanese town that has been razed by the fighting and which Israeli soldiers continue to occupy.
Other documented losses from Lebanon’s rich heritage include the Maqam Shamoun Al Safa in Shamaa, a shrine dating from the first century AD; dozens of heritage houses built in the 18th and 19th centuries across the south; and public libraries that were destroyed.
“We also need to add to that the number of mosques, cemeteries and churches that have been partly or entirely destroyed,” the minister said.
Israel has pursued a policy that may amount to the war crime of wanton destruction, legal experts have said, levelling dozens of border towns while carving out what it calls a security zone in southern Lebanon,
“So to destroy and erase, to transform 60 villages in southern Lebanon into a tabula rasa [a blank slate], is certainly something that hurts. It hurts the collective memory cherished by hundreds of thousands of people,” Mr Salameh said.
“And that is something people cherish as much as they cherish the buildings themselves. They cherish the memory of their place,” he added.
A file is being submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva detailing Israeli attacks on Lebanon's historical and cultural heritage that violate international humanitarian law, Mr Salameh said.
As examples he mentioned Tyre, Beaufort Castle – where Israeli soldiers remain encamped – and the village of Chamma to the south of Tyre, also occupied by the Israelis.
In an email to The National, Unesco said that it has granted provisional enhanced protection to 39 cultural properties, alongside international financial assistance totalling more than $100,000 to support emergency operations on the ground, following an extraordinary session in April at Lebanon’s request.
“This builds on efforts in 2024, when 34 sites were granted enhanced protection, bringing the total number of protected cultural properties in Lebanon to 73,” it said.
This means that these sites benefit from the “highest level of legal protection against attack and use for military purposes”, Unesco said in a press release, adding that non-compliance with these clauses could constitute grounds for criminal responsibility.
It did not comment on The National’s findings on the damage inflicted from an Israeli strike to the Tyre archaeological site, which is included in enhanced protection list, as well as questions about Israel’s potential violations of international law.
“What I accuse the bombers of is not taking enough precautions, especially in places where the ministry has clearly installed blue shields of enhanced protection for everyone to see,” Mr Salameh said.
War is not a new phenomenon for Lebanon. Even now it remains unclear whether the country is under a ceasefire or not. Either way, reconstruction in Lebanon is not new.
“You can rebuild it – once we have a ceasefire, once we have the money – you can rebuild. But it is never going to be the same,” Mr Salameh said.
He referred specifically to Beirut's downtown area that was destroyed in the 1975-1990 civil war. Its reconstruction by the major Lebanese company Solidere has not always been well received.
“That's what we did in central Beirut. We rebuilt downtown in a way that is not exactly different than it used to be – but it doesn't have the same spirit,” he said.
