Attacks on cultural sites are an affront to all humankind

He sends me a video of a bomb exploding and smoke rising.

“The alphabet came from Tyre.” My fingers move across the letters on the keyboard, the letters from Tyre.

“Our old apartment is on the sixth floor of the first smoking building on the right.”

“Memories, ice creams, swims, friends, neighbours, sunset beers – all smoked today. Barbarity beyond any barbarity was exported to the city where the alphabet came to the world. The city has the second-biggest hippodrome in the Roman Empire. It was a very important city in the early church days. It is easy to destroy. People co-existed here, with their differences, for centuries.”

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Pride in place, in histories, and in these letters of the alphabet which I am using to write are palpable. I’m writing with what has been destroyed. Not just the words are emptied of meaning, and places and memories torn apart, but the letters too.

The City of Tyre in Lebanon is a Unesco World Heritage Site.

It was damaged previously by Israel and subject to a Unesco report on the damage in 2006.

Now Israel is destroying it with sustained bombardments. This makes it an attack on property protected under the World Heritage Convention.

The International Criminal Court Policy on Cultural Heritage 2021, states that: “Destruction or appropriation of property is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, (articles 8(2)(a)(iv), 8(2)(b)(xiii) and 8(2)(e)(xii)).

In other words, the destruction of cultural heritage in war is a war crime.

Unesco’s inscription for Tyre, in the World Heritage Centre states: “Located on the southern coast of Lebanon, 83km south of Beirut, the antique town of Tyre was the great Phoenician city that reigned over the seas and founded prosperous colonies such as Cadiz and Carthage and according to legend, was the place of discovery of purple pigment.”

In 2023 Lebanon was requested to submit “to the World Heritage Centre, by December 1, 2024, an updated report on the state of conservation of the property and the implementation of the above, for examination by the World Heritage Committee at its 47th session”.

This report will now be a bald statement of threat and damage and destruction. It was to have been a report, assuring the World Heritage Committee that, despite the desperate economic situation in Lebanon, where at least a quarter of the population are refugee Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis and latterly Sudanese, efforts to protect cultural heritage were still under way. Until the bombing by Israel rendered such efforts null and void.

A report and investigation on extent of destruction will be required for Unesco and potentially the International Criminal Court to determine whether Israel is committing war crimes in Lebanon through the destruction of cultural property.

Observers may not be allowed in to document, given the way Israel is beginning to also occupy southern Lebanon and to attack UN Peacekeeping forces too.

During wars it is also the task of Unesco to make statements, to investigate and to document the destruction of heritage, attacks on schools, universities, journalists etc: Unesco is not often cited in such news of destruction by client media, but it is certainly not silent.

Another video arrives from my friend: “An elderly woman living on her own, Alison. You can see her place. She is too old and feeble to go anywhere.

“She is a Christian Palestinian woman displaced from Palestine in 1948. Now she has this to top it up at the end of her life.”

The alphabet came from Tyre.

Baalbek - Unesco World Heritage Site.

It's been a whole week in which threats to the cultural sites which have been designated as of worldwide significance for humanity have come under sustained threat from Israel, in Lebanon. News keeps coming to me from Lebanese and Palestinian friends and from random strangers I meet who are bursting with unfathomable loss.

After Tyre, two days later, comes Baalbek. I read the Israeli threats, the explusion order instruction to local inhabitants, the panic as people decide to go to the Roman ruins, those protected by our Conventions on World Heritage. Then I read the instructions from the mayor of Baalbek telling desperately afraid people that the ruins are not safe; that Israel will destroy them too, that Israel and her allies do not care for precious lives or precious heritage.

At the time of writing, Baalbek city is being bombed. Yesterday I predicted – based on evidence Israel supplied through its actions in Unesco City of Tyre and Unesco archaeological sites in Gaza – that Israel will destroy Baalbek and the international allies will offer “regrets” when they have the power and the *responsibility* – non-derogable – to protect, under the Genocide Convention and orders of the International Court of Justice.

What is Unesco doing? There are shrill voices on social media suggesting the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation are silent, and doing nothing. Of course their website (www.unesco.org/en/gaza/assessment) tells a different story with regard to the destruction by Israel in the Gaza Strip: Unesco is conducting a preliminary damage assessment for cultural properties through remote monitoring based on satellite imagery and analysis provided by Unitar/Unosat.

“As of September 17, 2024, out of the 120 sites that Unesco has been able to assess through satellite imagery, 69 sites have been damaged since October 7, 2023. Ten religious sites, 43 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, two depositories of movable cultural property, six monuments, one museum and seven archaeological sites.”

Destruction of cultural property and sites is a war crime under international law.

The Palestinian sites in the Unesco World Heritage register are fully documented and of them St Hilarion Monastery in Gaza is now inscribed in the Unesco list of sites in danger. The Unesco World Heritage Committee, meeting in New Delhi, India, has decided to inscribe the site “The Monastery of Saint Hilarion/Tell Umm Amer” in Palestine simultaneously on the World Heritage List … In December 2023, at its 18th session, Unesco’s Intergovernmental Committee for Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict had already decided to grant “provisional enhanced protection” to the monastery under the 1954 Hague Convention and its Second Protocol.

It didn’t stop the destruction. Nothing, it seems, can stop Israel on its crazed rampage now.

In Lebanon, there are six sites of World Heritage. They are: Anjar; Baalbek; Byblos; Ouadi Qadisha (the Holy Valley) and the Forest of the Cedars of God (Horsh Arz el-Rab); Rachid Karami International Fair-Tripoli, and Tyre.

I’ve bookmarked the list to monitor the threats from Israel. It feels like a somewhat ghoulish task, waiting to be proved right. I no longer fear their total destruction. That fear has been replaced by a strange certainty, mixed with a vain hope to be proved wrong in what is to come.

I keep remembering my trembling fingers on the keyboard on October 9, 2023, when I wrote the first statement from the Unesco Chair at the University of Glasgow, based on what I knew about the development of state-based genocidal intent, inferable from decades of experiencing the ways this plays out for Palestinians.

“Do not be silent in the face of the threat of genocide.”

Oh, how I wish I could have been proven wrong; that the responsibility to protect had been swiftly enacted by the United Nations and its member states.

Even now, how I wish that we must not wait this out until the genocide has been completed, that we might interrupted the frenzied killing and denial, which are of course the hallmarks of this crime against the whole of humanity.

Two World Heritage sites have been threatened and one damaged already just in the last two days.

The law protects cultural property during armed conflict. That protection stems from the principle that damage to the cultural property of any people, in the words of the 1954 Hague Convention, is “damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind”, says the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Journalists and citizens must keep asking elected representatives why – alongside enabling killing of thousands of non-combatants – they are actively enabling the damage to the cultural heritage of all humankind through stubborn refusal to sanction arms and to protect life and property.

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We must not accept that these are the new ways in which warfare is prospected. We must hold fast to the best protections we have. They are precious and hard-won and must be made meaningful through determined action.

Imagine if these were our Scottish World Heritage Sites. Imagine Scotland without Edinburgh Old and New Town; New Lanark; St Kilda, or the Forth Bridges. And imagine the people you know and love in these places. Expelled. Losing everything.

A Taxi Ride to an airport I’m from Lebanon, he says.

Oh, I am so sorry.

The bloody Israelis, he says.

We talk. What to say.

I’m from the south, he says.

My village.

His voice trembles.

They are shooting at the UN, he says.

My family, he says.

I’m from the south, he says, again.

The sun is a ball of fire and our words seem to pull it over the horizon in the 10-minute ride to the airport that takes us from sunrise to day break.

I am your neighbour here, he says.

I live in this street.

On the corner.

I saw the ride on my phone and thought I’ll do that.

They took the mosque in my village, he says Put explosives all round it, he says One day I will go back.

I am so sorry, I say.

I will keep doing everything in my power.

My words limp out.

They are destroying Tyre.

They are destroying Baalbek.

We pull into departures.

It is so good to meet people like you, he says.

What’s your name? I ask.

Ahmed, he says (that’s not his name).

Alison, I say.

We clutch each others’ hands.

Embrace.

His voice cracks into a thousand tears.

They killed 19 in my family last night, he says.

And I hold my breath.

And my words.

And cling on.

Alison Phipps is Unesco Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts at University of Glasgow