Mansouri, Lebanon

Mansouri  (المنصوري) is a village  in the  Tyre District in South Lebanon.

History
In the 1596 tax records in the early Ottoman era, it was named as a village,  Mansura, in the  nahiya (subdistrict) of   Tibnin   under the liwa' (district) of Safad. It had a population of 33 households, all Muslim. The villagers paid a fixed tax-rate of 25% on various agricultural products, including 1,300 akçe on wheat, 350 on barley; 150 on olive trees, 100 on "occasional revenues"; a total of 1,900 akçe.

In 1875 Victor Guérin noted here about "a dozen houses built with ancient materials, quite regularly carved. A oualy was dedicated to Neby Mansour. Cisterns dug into the rock and several broken sarcophagi also prove that this hamlet, now inhabited by some poor Métualis families, has succeeded a much larger former village."

The PEF's Survey of Western Palestine described the village: "A village built of stone, on the plain, surrounded by olives, figs, and arable land ; contains about 50 Moslems. Water from cisterns and spring near shore." They also noted some rock-cut tombs by the village.

On 13 April 1996, during Operation Grapes of Wrath, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) helicopter attacked a vehicle in Mansouri, killing two women and four children.

Turtle Reserve
In early 2000, environmentalist Mona Khalil – who had inherited her family's beachfront farm that stretches from the main road to the yet unspoiled beaches – moved to Mansouri from the Netherlands, where she had lived in exile for 25 years. Three months later, the IDF ended two decades of Israeli occupation in the nearby buffer zone and withdrew with its allies of the South Lebanon Army from there. In the same year, Khalil and her associate Habiba Fayed opened their Orange House Project as a bed-and-breakfast in order to finance their efforts to protect the nesting grounds of endangered sea turtles through ecotourism.

In June 2017, a television crew from LBCI was attacked while filming an interview with Mona Khalil at the turtle reserve. An unidentified assailant disrupted the filming, assaulting cameraman Samir Baitamouni and verbally threatening Khalil, citing affiliations with Hezbollah and Amal. Journalist Sobhiyya Najjar captured the incident on her mobile phone.