The French Catholic charity L'Oeuvre d'Orient has said Israeli troops destroyed a convent belonging to the Salvatorian Sisters, a Greek-Catholic religious order, in southern Lebanon.
The charity strongly condemned “a deliberate attack on a place of worship,” and accused Israel of systematically demolishing homes in southern Lebanon to prevent displaced civilians from returning.
The Israeli military also said that its forces operating in the village of Yaroun had damaged a structure inside a religious compound.
"It was determined that during the forces' operations to destroy terrorist infrastructure, one of the houses located in a religious compound was damaged," the military's spokesperson, Colonel Avichay Adraee, said on X on Saturday.
"There were no visible signs indicating this was a religious building," he continued.
"Once clear identifying features were observed on another building in the compound, the forces acted to prevent any further damage to the compound."
Religious site attacks
The incident comes days after the military jailed two soldiers for 30 days for desecrating a statue of Jesus Christ in the Christian village of Debl in south Lebanon, near the border with Israel.
A photograph that went viral on social media showed a soldier using a sledgehammer to strike the statue's head.
Israel has kept up deadly strikes on Lebanon despite the April 17 ceasefire that sought to halt more than six weeks of war on Lebanon.
The ceasefire text grants Israel the right to act against "planned, imminent or ongoing attacks".
Israeli soldiers are operating inside a "Yellow Line" running some 10 kilometres deep inside Lebanon's border, where they are carrying out wide-scale detonations and demolitions of buildings.
