Ancient Phoenician port and UNESCO World Heritage Site faces fresh bombardment as ceasefire frays
Israel's military issued an evacuation order on Tuesday for the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, warning residents to flee north of the Zahrani River ahead of possible strikes. For the first time, the order extended to the city's Christian Quarter, which earlier warnings had spared. Military spokesperson Avichay Adraee claimed Hezbollah was operating in the quarter and cautioned that any building used by the group could be targeted.
The order arrives as a U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, renewed only last week, frays badly. A strike on Tyre on Monday killed five people and wounded eight, four of the dead Red Cross paramedics, according to Lebanon's Health Ministry. The bombardment has also battered the city's celebrated antiquities: Ali Badawi, the culture ministry's regional director for archaeological sites in south Lebanon, said recent shelling had the "worst impact" on Tyre's ancient areas since the latest war began, striking the site's administrative office and strewing debris across the ruins.
What is at risk is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth. Settled more than 4,000 years ago and, by tradition, founded around 2750 B.C., Tyre rose to become the dominant city-state of Phoenicia. From its island fortress, whose name means "rock," Tyrian mariners commanded the Mediterranean and planted colonies as far away as Carthage and Cadiz. The city gave the ancient world Tyrian purple, the costly dye drawn from murex shells that clothed royalty and lent the Phoenicians their Greek name, the "purple people."
Tyre's reach extended into scripture and legend. Its King Hiram supplied the cedar and master craftsmen for Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, and the city was remembered as the mythical birthplace of Europa, who gave her name to Europe, and of Dido, founder of Carthage. Its most famous ordeal came in 332 B.C., when Alexander the Great besieged the island for seven months, building a vast causeway that joined Tyre to the mainland and transformed it forever into a peninsula.
Layered with Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Crusader remains, including the largest Roman hippodrome ever found, Tyre was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984. The designation has not shielded it from modern war: its ruins were damaged during Israeli offensives in 1982, 1996 and 2006, prompting a UNESCO "Heritage Alert" two decades ago.
Today Tyre is among Lebanon's largest cities, home to roughly 200,000 people and three Palestinian refugee camps. As the evacuation order empties its streets once more, residents and archaeologists alike confront a familiar fear, that a city that has survived Babylonians, Persians and Alexander may yet lose what four millennia have left standing.