Mona Khalil, a 77-year-old conservationist who spent more than two decades protecting endangered sea turtles along Lebanon's southern coast, has died from wounds sustained when an Israeli airstrike struck her beachside home on 4 June. She succumbed to her injuries on Friday, more than two weeks after the strike hit the coastal village of al-Mansouri in Tyre province — a district in southern Lebanon near the Mediterranean coast — destroying the building in which she had built both her life and her life's work. A colleague present at the time suffered severe burns. Mourners gathered in Beirut on Sunday to pay tribute to her.

Khalil was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1949 and grew up between Lebanon and the Netherlands, where she lived for nearly two decades as her family fled the Lebanese civil war. She returned to al-Mansouri in 1999 to revisit her grandmother's family home on the beach, and it was there, one morning in May, that she encountered a loggerhead sea turtle quietly laying its eggs in the sand — a chance meeting that changed the course of her life. She settled permanently in Lebanon the following year, painting the inherited house orange as a tribute to the Netherlands, and in time transformed it into a small conservation and ecotourism hub known as the Orange House. Trained by scientists from the Mediterranean Association to Save the Sea Turtles (Medassette), she and a rotating team of volunteers patrolled al-Mansouri beach at night each nesting season, marking tracks, securing nests with metal fencing, and guiding hatchlings safely to the water. The beach is one of Lebanon's most important nesting sites for loggerhead and green sea turtles, both endangered species.

Khalil's commitment held firm even through previous conflicts. During the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, she refused to evacuate during nesting season; a rocket struck her home and she lost part of her hearing, but she stayed. She again barricaded herself in the Orange House as hostilities resumed in 2024, reportedly believing she was safe as a civilian, until the Lebanese army persuaded her to leave. Friends recalled that she was deeply unhappy in Beirut and longed to return.