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.

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,........

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