The archaeological site at the Palestinian village of Sebastia, near the West Bank city of Nablus, is one of six sites added to UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger on Sunday, and one of three inscribed on an emergency basis. File Photo by Alaa Badarneh/EPA
UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee on Sunday added six new sites to its List of World Heritage in Danger, including three in Palestine, South Sudan and Lebanon on an emergency basis due to imminent threats.
Meeting in Busan, South Korea, the committee took emergency action to inscribe the Boma-Badingilo Migratory Landscape in South Sudan, the Mount Amel Castles in Lebanon and the village of Sebastia in Palestine onto the List of World Heritage in Danger.
The committee also added the already recognized Ancient City of Taurica Chersonese and its Chora in Russian-occupied Ukraine, the Historic Inner City of Paramaribo in Suriname and the city of Tyre, Lebanon, to the “danger” list, citing “serious threats to the values that justified their inscription in the first place.”
The emergency procedures are necessary due to “numerous crises of diverse nature, including armed conflict and climate change, that are heavily affecting heritage and exposing it to serious threats,” committee members said in a statement.
Among the emergency additions were the Boma-Badingilo Migratory Landscape in South Sudan, described as a “vast expanse” of East African savanna hosting the largest known terrestrial mammal migration in the world.
The unique biodiverse landscape is facing several serious threats, “notably infrastructure development, commercial poaching, and wildlife trafficking and trade, which directly affect the large populations of migratory mammals.”
Meanwhile, the five Mount Amel Castles in Lebanon are under threat due to the ongoing conflict directly between Israel and Hezbollah militias, which “jeopardizes the site’s conservation and requires urgent intervention,” according to the UNESCO committee.
The site, which illustrates the evolution of defensive systems in the region from the era of the Crusades and Islamic dynasties to the end of the 19th century, has already sustained heavy damage and “requires urgent intervention” to save.
Similarly, the ancient village of Sebastia in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of Palestine, located seven miles northwest of Nablus, is facing what UNESCO called a threat from Israel’s “planned expropriation” of the site and the creation of a national park, which the UN agency warned could divide the property.
The key archeological site contains a record of successive occupations by different civilizations from at least the 9th century BCE, when Samaria-Sebaste served as the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel, through the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods, the agency says.
In addition to the impact Middle Eastern conflict, the site also faces pressures related to development, land-use planning, governance and the erosion of the remains, the committee found.
