Conflict takes toll on historical sites

Arie Afriansyah, a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Indonesia, said that UNESCO's move to enhance protection for 39 cultural sites in Lebanon "is legally important, but only partly effective in practice".

"Enhanced protection under the 1999 Second Protocol gives listed sites the highest treaty-based protection: they must not be attacked or used for military purposes, and serious violations should be criminalized," he said.

"Its real value is deterrence, clearer no-strike identification, documentation, and stronger accountability later. But it is not a physical shield.

"In Lebanon, damage has still occurred, and the regime is weakened because Israel is not a party to the 1999 Second Protocol, though the 1954 Hague Convention still applies."

Parties in the conflict, Afriansyah said, should be held accountable if they attack the protected properties.

Zoghi, the Iranian artist, said the drafters of the 1954 Hague Convention understood something essential: that cultural property belongs not to the state that happens to hold it, but to all of humanity. That is why "the protection it affords is unconditional".

"What we observe today is a troubling pattern of selective enforcement. When Iran retaliates — and one may debate the proportionality or wisdom of that retaliation — resolutions are passed with remarkable speed," said Zoghi.

Yet, she said, the original strikes that triggered those responses, strikes that damaged mosques, synagogues, historic bazaars, archaeological museums, and pre-Islamic Zoroastrian sites, "receive no equivalent international censure".

"This asymmetry is not merely politically inconvenient. It is legally corrosive. It teaches every future aggressor that the Convention is a shield available only to the powerful," she added.

Zoghi said this is "not to justify any particular military action", but because the "integrity of international humanitarian law depends on its universal application".

"The moment it becomes a tool selectively deployed against one party, it ceases to function as law and becomes instead a form of geopolitical rhetoric dressed in legal language. That is dangerous for every civilization on Earth, not only for Iran," Zoghi said.

The civilization specialist also rejected framing the conflict as a "religious war" as Iranian civilization or "what we call the broader Persianate world" was never a monolith of religious identity.

"To reduce this heritage and this conflict to a simple religious binary is to commit violence against history itself. It erases the complexity of what Iran's civilization is — that is simultaneously Muslim, Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, ancient, and modern," Zoghi said.

"You may wage war against a government, (but) history will never forgive you for waging war against civilization."