A renowned Lebanese marine conservationist known for her work protecting endangered sea turtles died on Friday from injuries said to have been sustained in an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon earlier this month.

Mona Khalil, 76, was critically injured in an Israeli strike on June 4 that hit her home in the village of Mansouri, around 10 kilometers (six miles) south of the coastal city of Tyre, local and international media reported.

She was hospitalized at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, where she succumbed to her wounds on Friday. The Guardian newspaper reported that Khalil’s assistant was burned in the same strike but is recovering.

The Israel Defense Forces told CNN that Khalil was not a “target,” and that “there is no known IDF strike in which she was injured.”

It acknowledged, however, that strikes were conducted in the area around her home village “after the IDF issued evacuation warnings.”

Khalil was the founder of the Orange House Project, a sea turtle sanctuary named in tribute to the Netherlands, where she lived during the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war.

She returned to Lebanon from the Netherlands in 1999, when, on a visit to her family’s abandoned home near Tyre, she had her first encounter with the endangered sea turtles that lay their eggs on the Lebanese coast.

She recalled the encounter in a 2006 interview with the New York Times, telling the newspaper that she came across them “completely by accident.”

“I suddenly heard a noise. It was a turtle creeping through the sand coming to lay her eggs,” she said.

Lebanon is home to subspecies of the green turtle and loggerhead turtle, both of which are highly endangered according to the Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon.

The two species lay their eggs along the coast of Tyre in southern Lebanon and at the Palm Islands Nature Reserve in the country’s north.

According to the Times, Khalil successfully........

© The Times of Israel