If holy sites can be levelled, what’s next for international law?

On the first day of May, in the quiet southern Lebanese village of Yaroun, a monastery that had stood for generations disappeared in a cloud of dust.

The Sisters of the Holy Saviour monastery and its adjoining school — described by Lebanon’s National News Agency as one of the region’s most prominent educational institutions — was not merely another building on a war map. It was a memory. It was continuity. It was the place where thousands of children learned to read, where prayers rose in Arabic and Aramaic tones, where bells marked time long before drones did. Overnight, Israeli forces razed it to rubble.

In strategic language, this was framed as part of a ‘buffer zone’ operation. In moral language, it was the demolition of a civilisation marker. There is something especially chilling when war turns against stone.

Homes can be rebuilt; lives, never. But monasteries, churches, shrines, schools — these are repositories of collective memory. Their destruction signals something beyond military necessity. It suggests a politics of erasure.

Yaroun lies inside the 5–10 kilometre belt Israel has carved into southern Lebanon under the broad justification of denying Hezbollah operational footholds. Since late 2025, as the Israel–Hezbollah war escalated into one of the most destructive border conflicts since 2006, more than 2,600 people in Lebanon have reportedly been killed and over one million displaced. Entire villages have been emptied. Amnesty International estimates that more than 10,000 structures in southern Lebanon were destroyed by late 2025, many after active fighting had ceased, with no evident military necessity.

READ: Lebanon death toll since March 2 Israeli offensive surpasses 2,600

That number should haunt policymakers because this is not just collateral damage. It is a pattern.

In October 2024, Israeli airstrikes obliterated the 18th-century St George Melkite Church in Derdghaya. In Mhaibib, bulldozers flattened part of a village housing the 2,100-year-old shrine of Prophet Benjamin, a site sacred across faith traditions. In Gaza, the Holy Family Catholic Church — sheltering elderly civilians and children — was struck in July 2025, killing those who had sought sanctuary there.

Records from Palestinian and Lebanese authorities, supported by independent monitoring groups, indicate that the scale of destruction is far wider than individual incidents suggest, with more than 800 mosques in Gaza alone completely levelled since October 2023.

Across Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon, historic mosques, churches, and other religious landmarks have been repeatedly struck or erased, reinforcing what many observers describe as a systematic pattern of cultural devastation rather than isolated wartime damage.

Hospitals have fared no better. The UN and humanitarian agencies have repeatedly documented strikes on clinics and medical facilities in both Gaza and Lebanon. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights described the campaign against Gaza’s hospitals as a ‘full-fledged crime of genocide’.

The law here is not ambiguous. Under the Geneva Conventions and the 1954 Hague Convention, civilian infrastructure, religious institutions, and cultural heritage sites enjoy explicit protection unless imperative military necessity can be demonstrated. Collective punishment is prohibited under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Yet Human Rights Watch has warned of “numerous violations of the laws of war” committed with “total impunity”. Amnesty has stated plainly that such destruction “should be investigated and prosecuted as war crimes”.

The problem is not the absence of law. It is the collapse of consequence. Action on Armed Violence found that 88 per cent of 52 Israeli military investigations into alleged abuses were closed with no finding of wrongdoing; only one resulted in a prison sentence. This is not accountability. It is institutional theatre.

Meanwhile, international diplomacy continues to perform outrage without enforcement. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has condemned attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure as ‘unacceptable’. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk called the devastation in Lebanon ‘nothing short of horrific’, reminding all parties that the principles of distinction and proportionality are not optional moral preferences but binding legal obligations. Pope Leo XIV pleaded for an urgent ceasefire, invoking what should be the simplest diplomatic principle of all: humanity.

Yet the bulldozers keep moving. Even the April 2026 ceasefire, brokered under US auspices, left a dangerous loophole: Israel retained broad authority to strike what it defined as ‘imminent threats’. In practice, this became a legal corridor for continued destruction. Villages remained ghost towns. Churches remained targets. Monasteries remained expendable.

For the international system, this should trigger a deeper anxiety. Because once cultural destruction becomes normalised under the language of security, the precedent travels far beyond Lebanon. It corrodes the very architecture of the post-1945 international order.

If a state can redraw de facto borders, demolish religious heritage, and depopulate civilian zones under a unilateral security doctrine, what remains of sovereignty? What remains of humanitarian law except selective vocabulary for weaker states?

This is why Yaroun matters. Foreign policy is often tempted to treat cultural destruction as symbolic rather than strategic. That is a mistake. History shows otherwise. Sarajevo’s libraries, Mosul’s ruins, Aleppo’s mosques, Timbuktu’s mausoleums — attacks on heritage are never just about buildings. They are assaults on identity, legitimacy, and the possibility of post-war reconciliation.

Destroy a school, and reconstruction requires money. Destroying a monastery and its reconstruction requires trust.

READ: Gaza media office reports 377 Israeli ceasefire violations in April

That is far harder. The lessons of Bosnia, East Timor, and the protection of cultural communities in conflict were not abstract diplomatic exercises. They were reminders that peace agreements without moral architecture do not endure.

Policy realism should not mean moral illiteracy. The tragedy of southern Lebanon did not begin with rockets — it began with decades of occupation, invasion, and the normalisation of Israeli force as regional policy. Chaos was not a reaction; it was built into the architecture of power.

Hezbollah did not emerge from nowhere. It rose from the ruins of Israeli occupation, from villages shattered, families displaced, and a generation raised under humiliation and fear. To speak only of ‘self-defence’ while ignoring that history is to erase the origin of the fire.

Security cannot be built by demolishing monasteries, schools, and hospitals. A state cannot claim moral legitimacy while turning sacred ground into rubble. Yaroun’s monastery was not collateral damage — it was another chapter in a long pattern where destruction is justified and impunity protected.

Peace will not come by treating resistance as the disease while ignoring the occupation that created it. The deeper wound is sustained impunity — and until that truth is confronted, the region will remain trapped in inherited grief and endless war. 

If every monastery becomes a military target, then the law has already surrendered. The International Criminal Court’s warrants against senior Israeli officials over Gaza signalled that impunity is no longer guaranteed. Lebanon should pursue the same legal pathway. UNESCO should move beyond statements and establish emergency protection mechanisms for threatened heritage sites. Arms transfers should be tied to verifiable compliance with humanitarian law. Ceasefires should be monitored by neutral enforcement mechanisms, not faith in political goodwill.

Above all, language must stop sanitising destruction. Yaroun was not “cleared.” It was devastated. A monastery was not “collateral.” It was a sanctuary. A school was not “neutralised.” It was a future interrupted.  There is a moral test hidden inside foreign policy, and it often arrives quietly — not in summit declarations, but in the silence after church bells stop ringing.

In Yaroun, that silence is now permanent. The rubble asks the international community a simple question: if sacred places are no longer sacred, what exactly is left to defend?

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.