Meeting in Busan (South Korea), the 196 Member States of UNESCO will examine from Monday July 20 until July 29, during the annual meeting of the World Heritage Committee, around thirty new applications wishing to add more than 1,200 sites already included in the famous World Heritage list.
Three will be subject to classification under the emergency procedure for inscription on both the world heritage list and that of heritage in danger. Two are located in the Middle East: the archaeological site of Sebastia, the Samaria of the Bible, in the north of the occupied West Bank, in which Israel has been interested for years for its tourist potential, and a set of five castles of Mount Amel, in the south of Lebanon bombed by Israel since the start of the war in the Middle East. One of the best known, dating from the time of the Crusades and conquered at the end of May by the Israeli army is the Beaufort fortress, had already served as a base during the two decades of occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000.
Israel left UNESCO in 2017 (like the United States, whose departure will be effective at the end of 2026) but remains a member of the World Heritage Committee and is a signatory to the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the World Heritage Convention.
The third site, South Sudan, should be included in the world heritage list for the first time, with a site requiring special attention both due to the persistent conflict between government forces and opposition militias and global warming. The savannahs of Boma-Badingilo, an area of 37,500 km2 located between the White Nile and the Ethiopian border, are home to the largest terrestrial migration of mammals in the world, particularly antelopes.
“Heritage allows communities that have been traumatized, victims of conflicts, to begin to return, to rebuild themselves,” underlines the director of the UNESCO World Heritage Center, Lazare Eloundou Assomo, insisting on the fact that inclusion on the endangered list is not a sanction against the States where these sites are located, but allows “to mobilize funding, partners and attention” to benefit from increased protection.
Unauthorized excavations in Crimea
In addition to these emergency procedures, other sites should be added to the list of properties in danger, such as Tyre, an ancient Phoenician city in southern Lebanon hit in recent months by Israeli bombings, or the ancient city of Chersonese Taurus and its chôra, located in Crimea, a Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia since 2014. The latter is affected by unauthorized excavations, large-scale construction and movement of artifacts. In Ukraine, local heritage is ravaged by the war launched by Moscow in 2022. The last emblematic site damaged was the Dormition Cathedral in kyiv, hit by a Russian airstrike in June.
According to UNESCO, Lake Baikal, the largest reserve of liquid fresh water in the world, in Russia, suffers from pollution, tourist pressure, a hydroelectric project upstream (Mongolia) and even large-scale logging. After having repeatedly called on Moscow to act to stop “the ecological degradation of the lake (…) urgently”, UNESCO considers the measures taken insufficient.
Last year, the organization already warned of the multiplication of climate threats with almost three quarters of world heritage sites “facing serious water risks, water shortages or flooding”. And of the fifty properties inscribed on the list of world heritage in danger, half were there due to the direct consequences of conflicts.
Among the new World Heritage nominations, the beaches of the Allied Landing of June 6, 1944, in the north-west of France, the so-called Cathar castles in the south-west of the country, two theaters built in the Brazilian Amazon and the Tunisian village of Sidi Bou Saïd should make their entry into the prestigious list.
