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 […]